As sent to my primary care, who I actually do like:
United Healthcare, in their omnibenevolent wisdom, sees fit to drop the One Touch Ultra from my preferred drug list as of September. They have offered several alternatives.
My primary goal with a glucometer is to not require a smartphone to do the simple task of marking whether any reading is before or after a meal. Out of their list of suggestions, the Contour Plus Blue meter meets my requirements and is not discontinued.
Joy. And happiness.
(This is the primary care who, upon learning which insurance I had, while we were trying to solve a problem, asked whether I was up to date on the then-recent news about their CEO, then said "You'd think they'd have learned their lesson." She's from Canada.)
Yes, that is Anson Mount’s Captain Pike as a Puppet! š StarTrek: Strange New Worlds SEASON FOUR features a puppet-themed episode, created by the iconic Jim Hensonās Creature Shop. The episode is directed by Jordan Canning!
First of all, you're really kind to inquire about this! Thank you. :)
Fortunately, eating isn't too much of a problem for me at this point. For the first few weeks in May it was definitely an issue, as my appetite simply vanished for a while. But the travel that I embarked on at that point helped solve that problem, as the significant increase in my daily activity made it impossible to avoid getting really hungry at regular intervals. So that situation settled down pretty quickly, I'm glad to say.
At the moment the thing that's still missing in action is any particular pleasure in cooking, as before there was always someone else around here to be cooking with (even if Peter wasn't necessarily going to be eating whatever I was making: there was always interest, and routine compliments, suggestions, or critiquing coming from Himself as he went about his daily business). Now I have to learn to cook on my own again, which is... a challenge, but entirely doable. I did it long before we met, and I've learned a whole lot since then. The things I'm cooking are also shifting somewhat. I'm having to handle portion control differently, and am also shifting the focus to different kinds of nutrition planning, since I'm no longer automatically shopping for two people with different preferred foods and eating routines.
As for takeout services: That's really kind of you to think of, but the house is situated way too far out into the country for anything like that to be available to me. (In Ireland, at the moment at least, such services are only to be found in largeish towns or the big cities.) The only place that does any kind of delivery at all to this area is a Chinese restaurant about 10km from here... and frankly, both due to a limited menu there and my IBS, there's only so much Chinese I can eat.) :)
...Now, for those who're concerned about my eating and still want to contribute something, probably the best way to deal with that would be to start a small monthly subscription over at the Ko-Fi and tag it "Groceries". Trust me, it won't go to waste.
I’m reading the scriptwriters’ guide for TOS and it’s cracking me up in many places. It’s so obvious that, from the very beginning, they were already aware of so many of the issues people complain about today.
First there’s a multiple choice quiz, what’s wrong with this scene?
Answer: C! Absolutely Kirk would not hug the yeoman at this point! That’s unprofessional!
The Prime Directive gets explained. As I keep telling people, it’s not never broken, it’s just supposed to only be broken for very good reasons.
For people wondering how to write a stardate: you make up some numbers!
No saluting! Yes optimism!
There is so much “think of the budget” in here. Yes you can use the shuttle bay but only if it’s relevant, we have to use miniatures. Yes you can have a space suit but please don’t ask for zero gravity. And where aliens are concerned, you can have some makeup but please focus on the interior differences not just tentacles!
Honestly I think Spock is a better alien than, say, Jabba the Hutt, because as human as he looks, he’s much more different on the inside. People like to dismiss Star Trek aliens as “forehead of the week” but it’s kind of a stage shorthand for “we’re about to discover a unique culture, these people are different from you in ways you might not expect.”
Weāre a small book convention which started out based on our love of the Young Wizards series by Diane Duane and have since broadened our scope to include all things speculative fiction. Weāve had panels about writing and mythology, real world science and space exploration, publishing, linguistics, video games, and more. Weāve gone to botanical gardens, aquariums, been on whale watching tours, and tours of Manhattan (donāt ask us about the trains).
Our theme this year is Ordealerās Choice! When youāre on Ordeal, or a Quest, or a Significant Journey, the choices you make are of utmost importance. CrossingsCon 2025 is all about those choices - which ones we make, and when, and why.
If this sounds like something you would enjoy, come check us out! Our next con will be this August 15-17 in Philadelphia, PA, USA, Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way, the Local Group, the Universe. Badges and hotel rooms are available now at crossingscon.org.
Glad to meet you, Cousin!
#crossingscon will take place Aug 15-17, 2025 in Philadelphia, USA. Badges and hotel rooms are available now at crossingscon.org
After Belovedest and I got our Home Depot errand finished, we went out to the car.
Belovedest: 6'4", white, short clipped brown hair, receding hairline, white Honeywell dome type N-95 mask, white T-shirt reading" Classically Trained" with a bunch of old-school video game controllers (but not any as old as the ones they started with), khaki colored cargo shorts, dark plastic slide type sandals.
Me: 5'6.5", white, shoulder length dark brown and variously blue fine 2c wavy hair held back with a grey rhinestone headband, violet eyeshadow with black liner behind blue frame rectangular glasses, black Breath of the Nature KF-94 mask, black chain necklace with spikes, silver star necklace, dark blue velour cardigan over a full length flowing embroidered black Holy Clothing dress, smartwatch with rainbow band, several medical bracelets and a medical necklace, some silver bangles with black, violet, and labradorite semiprecious gems, toeless black compression stockings, and a charcoal and violet pair of serious business support hiking sandals, just done driving a motorized grocery cart.
Him: sitting in his candy-colored Tesla, medium colored hair, with a full mountain man beard.
"You fuckin' weirdos," he muttered, deliberately loud enough to be heard inside the open windows of Belovedest's Toaster.
"Same to you, buddy!" I called as he started to pull out, waving my hand out the window.
Current Mood:amused
Current Music:šµš¶I wish that you would just leave š¶šµ
āā¦a young girl named Aurora (Sloan) seeks out her neighbor (Mikkelsen) for help after she believes her family has been gobbled up by a monster living under her bed. The neighbor just so happens to be a skilled hitman, who is fairly certain that the childās parents may have been the accidental victims of a group looking to assassinate him. Keeping his young neighbor safe becomes the hitmanās top priority, as both characters go on a mission to face down their monsters side by side.ā
i think it’s important to acknowledge that the reason why mastercard/visa has such a stranglehold on american society is because cash is not the main form of payment in the usa. the predominance of card has effectively privatized currency
in japan, one of the reasons why dlsite and other similar websites are able to just remove visa as a payment option instead of changing any of their merchandise (aside from the fact that visa doesn’t have a monopoly here) is because cash payments for online transactions remain an option. even if you don’t have a jcb credit card or paypay or whatever, you can still pay for your online purchases using cash by taking your barcode to a convenience store, and you can do this for essentially every online vendor, meaning credit card companies can’t just impose their moral judgments on your purchases with much repercussion
How does that barcode system work? I’ve never heard of something like that.
1. you add whatever porn games or movies or books you want to your cart and go to checkout
2. you select cash payment at conbini as your payment method
3. youre emailed a barcode that you take to the conbini
4. you show it to the cashier, they scan it, and you pay what you owe. note that the cashier does not see what youre buying
[video description: two gray tabby cats sitting at opposite ends of an air hockey table, batting a puck back and forth. the caption reads: “you put up an old air hockey table not realizing your kittens would use it the most”.]
This unusual door knocker from Clun, England, features a mother cat carrying her kitten ā sculpted in cold, weathered bronze, yet full of tenderness.
Equal parts whimsical, eerie, and adorable, it feels like something out of a forgotten fairytale.
This should be everything unread on my fiction shelves plus everything unread on my Kindle. Items in bold are only on the Kindle. Several are on both, but I think I managed to remove all the duplicates. (Formatting it this way, it's kind of interesting to see where I started acquiring everything in ebook except for gifts and library discards.)
This essay was alluded to and quoted from in several of the essays I read about Edna St. Vincent Millay. I correctly suspected I could find the journal issue (The Outlook, vol. 147 no. 10, 1927) on the Internet Archive, and I'm very glad I looked for it. Here's a couple-few excerpts.
If I could meet one person from history I've always said it would be Millay, but right now I'm so enamored of her prose I can't even think what I'd say to her. To be able to write like that...!
I read today that Google's old link shortener, using the goo.gl domain, would stop working on August 25th. I didn't find any of their links in my journal, but I did find a bunch in my Twitter archive, so I grabbed copies of those links while I could still resolve them. (Most of them were Mental Floss retweets.)
I need to get back to curating my old tweets and including them in my journal archives before that entire site collapses into a black hole.
I also downloaded my archive of Pocket links last month when that site announced its retirement, but I hadn't used it in several years and honestly it was just another bitbucket to toss stuff into and forget about. I hardly ever actually made time to go back and read or watch any of the links I "saved for later." (The deadline for that one is October 8th.)
Seems like lately, time is less of a river and more of an avalanche.
I shall die, but
that is all that I shall do for Death.
I hear him leading his horse out of the stall;
I hear the clatter on the barn-floor.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba,
business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.
But I will not hold the bridle
while he clinches the girth.
And he may mount by himself:
I will not give him a leg up.
Though he flick my shoulders with his whip,
I will not tell him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where
the black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death;
I am not on his pay-roll.
I will not tell him the whereabout of my friends
nor of my enemies either.
Though he promise me much,
I will not map him the route to any man's door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living,
that I should deliver men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city
are safe with me; never through me
Shall you be overcome.
I didn't feel like inflicting a whole bundle of Millay on everyone who reads poetry but I don't mind inflicting her on all of you. So here goes.
Two Sonnets In Memory
(Nicola SaccoāBartolomeo Vanzetti) Executed August 23, 1927
ā
As men have loved their lovers in times past
And sung their wit, their virtue and their grace,
So have we loved sweet Justice to the last,
That now lies here in an unseemly place.
The child will quit the cradle and grow wise
And stare on beauty till his senses drown;
Yet shall be seen no more by mortal eyes
Such beauty as here walked and here went down.
Like birds that hear the winter crying plain
Her courtiers leave to seek the clement south;
Many have praised her, we alone remain
To break a fist against the lying mouth
Of any man who says this was not so:
Though she be dead now, as indeed we know.
ā ”
Where can the heart be hidden in the ground
And be at peace, and be at peace forever,
Under the world, untroubled by the sound
Of mortal tears, that cease from pouring never?
Well for the heart, by stern compassion harried,
If death be deeper than the churchmen say,ā
Gone from this world indeed what's graveward carried,
And laid to rest indeed what's laid away.
Anguish enough while yet the indignant breather
Have blood to spurt upon the oppressor's hand;
Who would eternal be, and hang in ether
A stuffless ghost above his struggling land,
Retching in vain to render up the groan
That is not there, being aching dust's alone?
I saw and reblogged this one a while back, but itās always worth repeating, and this time Iām adding a bit of background info comparing common fantasy sword features to the Real Thing (with pictures, of course.)
Leaf-bladed swords are a very popular fantasy style and were real, though unlike modern hand-and-a-half longsword versions, the real things were mostly if not always shortswords.
Here are Celtic bronze swordsā¦
ā¦Ancient Greek Xiphoiā¦
ā¦ and a Roman āMainz-patternā gladiusā¦
Saw or downright jagged edges, either full-length or as small sections (often where they serve no discernible purpose) are a frequent part of fantasy blades, especially at the more, er, imaginatively unrestrained end of the market.
Real swords also had saw edges, such as these two 19th century shortswords, but not to make them cool or interesting. Theyāre weapons if necessaryā¦
ā¦but since they were carried by Pioneer Corps who needed them for cutting branches and other construction-type tasks, their principal use was as brush cutters and saws.
This dussack (cutlass) in the Wallace Collection is also a fighting weapon, like the one beside itā¦
ā¦but may also have had the secondary function of being a saw.
A couple of internet captions say itās for ācutting ropesā which makes sense - heavy ropes and hawsers on board a ship were so soaked with tar that they were often more like lengths of wood, and a Hollywood-style slice from the Heroās rapier (!!) wouldnāt be anything like enough to sever them. However swords like this are extremely rare, which suggests they didnāt work as well as intended for any purpose.
I photographed these in Basel, Switzerland, about 20 years ago. Look at the one on the bottom (I prefer the basket-hilt schiavona in the middle).
A lot of āflambergeā (wavy-edge) swords actually started out with conventional blades which then had the edges ground to shape - the dussack, that Basel broadsword and this Zweihander were all made that way.
The giveaway is the centreline: if itās straight, the entire blade probably started out straight.
Increased use of water power for bellows, hammers and of course
grinders made shaping blades easier than when it had to be done by hand. This flamberge Zweihander, however, was forged that way.
Again, the clue is the centre-line.
Incidentally those
Parierhaken (parrying hooks - a secondary crossguard) are among the only
real-life examples of another common fantasy feature - hooks and
spikes sticking out from the blade.
Here are some rapiers and a couple of daggers showing the same difference between forged to shape and ground to shape. The top and bottom rapiers in the first picture started as straights, and only the middle rapier came from the forge with a flamberge blade.
Thereās no doubt about this one either.
The reason - though that was a part of it - wasnāt just to look cool and show off what the owner could afford (any and all extra or unusual work added to the price) but may actually have had a function: a parry would have been juddery and unsettling for someone not used to it, and any advantage is worth having.
However, like the saw-edged dussack, flamberge blades are unusual - which suggests the advantage wasnāt that much of an advantage after all.
Hereās a Circassian kindjal, forged wigglyā¦
ā¦and an Italian parrying dagger forged straight then ground wigglyā¦
There were also parrying daggers with another fantasy-blade feature, deep notches and serrations which in fantasy versions often resemble fangs or thorns.
These more practical historical versions are usually called āsword-breakersā but I prefer āsword-catcherā, since a steel blade isnāt that easy to break. Taking the opponentās blade out of play for just long enough to nail him works fine.
NB - the curvature on the top one in this next image is AFAIK because of the book-page it was copied from, not the blade itself.
The missing tooth on that second dagger, and the crack halfway down this next oneās blade, shows what happens when design features cause weak spots.
So there you go: a quick overview of fantasy sword features in real life.
Hereās a real-life weapon that looks like it belongs in a fantasy story or film - and this doesnāt even have an odd-shaped bladeā¦
Just a very flexible oneā¦
If you want more odd blades, Moghul India is a good place to startā¦
i could not ask for a better addition to my meme post than blade education thank you so much
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