who only by moving can balance

[21:17] kaberett: I recognise that this is wildly hypocritical of me
[21:18] kaberett: but I've just stumbled into the mechanical pencil subreddit and I am quite ????????? at the
[21:18] kaberett: the mechanical pencil collectors
[21:18] kaberett: and like this is clearly because I found A Good Mechanical Pencil That I Liked and have stuck with it
[21:18] kaberett: and also because I don't actually have much call for using different lead softnesses etc
[21:18] kaberett: BUT ALSO

[21:25] kaberett: .......... having said which
[21:25] kaberett: ................ now that I've spent like 5 minutes in the subreddit
[21:25] kaberett: .................... I kind of want to buy another mechanical pencil


(Turns out the Pentel GraphGear 1000, which I like enough that I bought a second one after I lost my first and then got A one as a present? ... also gets released. in limited editions. that are COLOURS.)

Last seen: S02E07, "Who's the Cool Girl Josh Is Dating?"

This show. It is so! exquisitely! put together!

Let's see.

( Read more... )

Earlier:

sebastienne: But yeah I thought v-pillows were an obscure pregnancy thing and here's one in Dunelm for £18
kaberett: They're increasingly marketed to "side-sleepers", who are apparently a demographic now
sebastienne: .... There's a sleeping style trinary
sebastienne: (ternary? trinity?)

Which is how I got to, well, this:


The image is a terrible MS Paint-style sketch, showing two objects.On the left is a tetrahedron, with the top vertex is labelled A; the bottom left is labelled NB; the bottom right is labelled F; the bottom front is labelled M. On the right is a triangle, similarly labelled: top left NB, top right F, bottom M.

The context is that I explained that a ternary diagram is something I use in geochemistry, and I get quite Catholic about trinities, so clearly trinary was the way to go.

... but wait, I said, now I want to draw a diagram of a triangle with the appropriately labelled vertices!!! obviously this has the perpetual problem of reducing gender to a component-based system but I'm still really amused by it!!!

The idea being, right, that at the base of the tetrahedron you've got a plane. If we (this is facetious) categorise any given gender as some combination of female, male, and non-binary, that can be represented as a coordinate in said plane. This is similar to how we represent the chemical composition of feldspars: you make a ternary diagram, with the vertices labelled as K₂O/orthoclase & microcline (top), Na₂O/albite (bottom left), and CaO/anorthite (bottom right), and you get a solid solution that hugs the left-hand border of your triangle: in this band, a stable mineral of that composition (with those proportions of potassium, sodium and calcium) exist, and outside it they don't and you instead get a mixture of different minerals. For bonus points, the solid solution is temperature-dependent: at "low" temperatures (less than about 700°C), there's a gap between albite and K-spars (orthoclase and microcline) where there's no single stable mineral and you again end up with a mixture of different minerals. (They're very pretty under the microscope!)

And then sometimes you actually want a fourth vertex, so instead of sticking to a 2D representation you shift to 3D, and a tetrahedron, and this is mostly deployed for what's called CMAS in geochemistry terms, but the point is that A Single Plane might not be enough to represent what's going on; you might want vertical distance too.

ENTER THE GENDER TETRAHEDRON.

I propose (still facetiously) a model in which we've got the base plane of female-male-nonbinary, along with another component, agender. The closer to any vertex your gender experience lies, the more dominant the influence of that vertex. So, for example, you might be up near the agender vertex, with only weak influences from everything else; or you might be on the agender-female edge; or you might be on what's thought of as the "traditional gender spectrum", the male-female edge. Or if you're genderfluid but definitely experience gender you might lie somewhere on the M-F-NB face on any given day, or perhaps your gender amplitude fluctuates but you're definitely never a man, and you wander around the A-F-NB face.

Or maybe you occupy some other plane through this gendered space! Maybe your gender is temperature-dependent! We can take different slices through the tetrahedron at different heights, such that the total gender area corresponds to the total gender strength!

This is thoroughly silly and absolutely not intended to be A Complete Theory Of Anything, but it was an excuse to combine (1) geochemical representations of the world, (2) nerding about gender, and (3) dubious art, so, you know, that's been a very pleasant diversion for me this afternoon.

1. Yesterday afternoon, at 4.30pm, I sent off the latest draft of the current paper to my co-authors in advance of our meeting on Tuesday. I had been working at it steadily, in small chunks every day. At no point did I stay up past midnight working on it. It isn't perfect, partly because it can never be and partly because most of the outstanding stuff relies on getting input from a co-author who's been avoiding my e-mails since April; I'm very pleased with myself for maintaining sensible sleep cycles, and for sending it off "unfinished", because I don't think there is actually much to gain from me carefully polishing the presentation and formatting of an appendix that is not yet complete.

2. The casserole my mother bought me (I think when I started the PhD) is currently full of apples I brought home from my parents' on Saturday evening; I've done about half the bag, and everything smells correct. (It's James Grieve; they're mostly not available commercially, but they're what I grew up with, and I'm always faintly disappointed by apples that aren't them. So: I gathered up a quantity of them, and I'll gather up a quantity more when I go for dinner tomorrow, and I'll jar them, and I'll have enough to put on yoghurt and in crumble and in cake for the next year, I hope.)

3. Passing a pound-a-bowl market earlier today, it transpired that the cardboard crates of two-or-so kilos of blueberries really were one quid each. So I got one of those (I was not going to buy more, to get home on public transport), and I need to decide how many to freeze and whether o jam any and if I want to make clafoutis happen, and so on and so forth. This is a lovely problem to have.

4. Shortly afterwards, while poking around charity shops looking for yet more tablecloths (pace the Graun), on my way home from a hospital appointment that was uninspiring but unproblematic, I found a pasta maker for fifteen quid. Nobody I asked said it was a bad idea quickly enough, and that's how I ended up heading home on public transport with a lap full of pasta machine and two kilos of blueberries. "...", said a friend. "How does this stuff even happen to you so much" "I really don't know how you live like this" "But well done" -- which I will take. (This also, conveniently, provides me with My Next Cooking Goal. I think I probably don't care about the spaghetti attachment but I am eyeing up the ravioli one...)

5. I am sitting in the corner of my sofa, facing the French windows, looking out on the grass and the sunshine. (I love this house.)

6. I am now, after today's adventures in public transport, most of the way through CN Lester's book Trans Like Me. I keep crying over it in public. I have been earwormed with a song off Come Home, Not Again (and have just put it on: I'm used to breaking - but not this time/Of all the things you've taken, I'm not giving me from mine/I know I'm better lonely but alive).

7. On which tangentially-related topic, I recently got my act together to actually listen to Jesus & His Judgemental Father's latest, It Might Get Better, and I just absolutely adore the lyric my breakfast is an existential crisis. And I have a whole pile of books to curl up and wallow in, which I'm very much looking forward to -- Provenance, which I haven't yet had brain for, and the new Max Gladstone, and the new Nnedi Okorafor along with some of her back catalogue, and all the Kai Ashante Wilson I just acquired, and...

8. Board games! On Sunday I went to a board game social being run by my BSL-teacher-now-friend (having been a longstanding friend of A's)! I negotiated social anxiety in the run-up! I played two new-to-me games, with one person in the group each time that I didn't previously know, and it... worked? I didn't cry? I panicked a bit at the start of the second one but actually it was okay? I did the thing? I won one of them? I... am really, really proud of myself. I am so aware of how much progress this is: eighteen months ago, or thereabouts, I finally finally managed to persuade myself to sit down with a rulebook and an Adam in our living room and have a go at playing Thud!, which I'd wanted to basically since I saw it being play-tested at a Discworld convention. I think I ended up crying twice just reading the rulebook, while A was in the kitchen carefully giving me space to have a panic? I ended up crying a bunch more over the course of our couple of experimental collaborative games? ... I just played two new-to-me games with strangers, on no more prep than breezily informing people that I have hilarious boardgame-related trauma, would want to spend five minutes anxiously reading the rules in silence before starting, and that if I asked a question about game mechanic and it wasn't addressed to you by name then pretend I didn't say anything and let A answer. I... am so pleased with myself.

9. ... slipper socks. I sort of resent that I like them so much, and they are the precise opposite of what the podiatrists I was seeing wanted me to do for wearing around the house, but fundamentally I really hate slippers and would by defaul be barefoot but also my feet get really cold really quickly. So now I own two pairs of ridiculous slipper socks, and I wear other socks underneath and slouch around in them, and I spend much less time with my feet painfully cold?

10. ... and on Thursday I'm heading down to Brighton for The October Ritual, an aquarium trip, and Terre á Terre, which I've been curious about for a while.


There is lots that is good that is going on. I'm spending the weekend in Cornwall (well, driving to and from -- a lightning visit is To Be Made), and while there will be Wrangling To Be Done I am also, very much, looking forward to going (however briefly) home.

THAT'S NOT WHAT THALLIUM POISONING LOOKS LIKE

( Spoiler. )

Also? My tailor's better than Daniel Craig's.

It is a delight to me that I had a conversation on Sunday night in which I pointed out to facesfriend that I do not, in point of fact, know them very well -- I started paying any consistent attention to their existence about 6 months ago and we started dating about 4 months ago (which is weird for me; I am really not used to getting to know people by dating them); he looked gently baffled and said he thought that, in fact, I knew him pretty well. I paused. "Okay," I said, "my predictive model for your behaviour is based on a relatively small sample size, and what data I do have isn't necessarily representative." "Right," he said, "that makes sense." Hurrah for human interactions wherein I get to express myself like that and it's just okay; this is, of course, some of why Hel bemoans that there's no way they can ever write dialogue that is an accurate representation of conversations they have with friends, because nobody would believe people talk that way in real life.

(Tangentially relatedly, but only sort of sideways rather than directly: I am having a pretty bad case of the I-am-not-allowed-to-want-things/I-am-not-allowed-to-be-wanteds this week. Not entirely sure why, but it's a thing; sorry if I go a bit spiky and weird on you.)

facesfriend: Aha I was looking up whether aloe vera is actually effective as a burn treatment
facesfriend: And found a page with general "how to treat burns" advice
kaberett: it does appear to be
kaberett: ...
kaberett: would you like an aloe vera
kaberett: please say you'd like an aloe vera
kaberett: please?
kaberett: ...
kaberett: there's another three in the back garden
kaberett: that have managed to survive the winter
facesfriend: Wow. Didn't think you'd be able to conscience leaving them out to freeze...
kaberett: THE BACK GATE GOT LOCKED
facesfriend: (page includes an assortment of general points about burn treatment, general medical stuff such as you might find on NHS website or similar)
kaberett: (did you burn yourself)
facesfriend: (plus a single bullet under the various bits of treatment advice for "if the patient is still on fire")
kaberett: hahahaha "put the fire out"? :-p
facesfriend: (BECAUSE IF THE PATIENT WERE STILL ON FIRE YOU WOULD BE LOOKING FOREVER FIRST AID ADVICE ON THE INTERNET, RIGHT?)
facesfriend: No I am not burned but I was pondering adopting an aloe and wondering if they were actually effective for that or if it was just placebo
kaberett: they are actually effective
kaberett: please take an aloe
kaberett: (... were you considering adopting someone else's aloe)
kaberett: (if you're not dating them can I pull rank)
facesfriend: (baby I only have eyes for your aloe)
kaberett: (THANK GOD)

but will e-mail to people who want to recoil in horror, particularly in the knowledge that it represents my best chance at actually getting any sleep tonight...

23:46 <evanmcc> one of those tuples has managed to break emacs's syntax highlighting
23:46 <kaberett> *snort*
23:46 <evanmcc> you win one internet
23:46 <evanmcc> from 1997
23:47 <kaberett> does it contain a useful graph plotting package with a gUI
23:47 <kaberett> ...
23:47 <kaberett> thank you that has genuinely made my evening :D
23:47 <kaberett> I did say it was the worst script ever ;)
23:48 <evanmcc> there was no such thing as a useful plotting package in 97
23:48 <evanmcc> I have something worse, but it isn't actually on this machine

19:53 < kaberett> happy to listen
19:54 < kaberett> I'm leaning more towards "biting" than "providing active
                  listening to help you work thing sout"
19:54 < kaberett> as a heads-up
19:54 < kaberett> because um
19:54 < kaberett> http://kaberett.dreamwidth.org/158899.html
19:54 < kaberett> ^ that is what anxiety feels like
19:54 < kaberett> I am still mostly coherent, but I am tensed and hunched and
                  my pulse is elevated and I am feeling choked and adrenaline-y
19:54  * Woggy nods
19:56 < Woggy> (That poem ;_;)
19:56 < kaberett> hah <3
19:56 < kaberett> combination of 3 or 4 nights' insomnia
19:57 < kaberett> (poems tend to come to me that way)
20:00 < Woggy> It is beauty and truth and love and feels given form and shape
               and on the paper and...yes.
20:00 < kaberett> there was a sonnet I tried writing months ago, about the body
20:00 < kaberett> and the body as poetry
20:00 < kaberett> comparing the cage of our ribs to the constraints of the
                  sonnet form
20:01 < kaberett> so that's where I pulled that particular metaphor from, and
                  maybe one day the sonnet will get written
20:01 < kaberett> (I am having Many Thoughts about legibility and the body as
                  story and skin as canvas)
20:01  * Woggy quiet nods
20:02 < Woggy> (For all i'm somewhat mrh about certain aspects of my body, the
               fact that it's _mine_, with the attendant history, is
               an...important physical anchor.
20:05 < kaberett> and I poem I was probably unconsciously drawing on while
                  writing that is this one:
                  http://www.fulgura.de/sonett/karussel/original/prayer.htm
20:05 < kaberett> the "radio's prayer" at the end is the Shipping Forecast,
                  which is a BBC Institution and generally regarded as very
                  soothing
20:06 < kaberett> and part of the reason that I associate it with my poem, in
                  spite of it not actually containing any real talk about
                  bodies, is because of her other work, and how much of it
                  _does_ contain bodies
20:06 < kaberett> the woman whose skin becomes a flawless map of her hometown,
                  for example
20:06 < kaberett> and also this one, which speaks about the emptiness and
                  interstices:
http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/carol_ann_duffy/poems/8118
20:06 < kaberett> WHICH IS BASICALLY I have a ramble about my poetic
                  influences, and feel free to not engage with any of it ;)
20:08 < kaberett> (and then it spins off into how much I feel that Words, Wide
                  Night is - or can be - the same kind of love-song to self
                  that is Derek Walcott's Love After Love...)

-- which -- self-referentially? recursively? -- brought back to mind the book I am currently reading, Ursula LeGuin's Changing Planes (content notes: SO RACIST seriously do not bother with it it took me about 15 pages to get to the point where the only reason I am finishing it up is completionism), in which there is discussed a plane/dimension/world in which language consists of around 5000 syllables that can be strung together, where the meaning of each syllable is determined almost entirely by its context -- the syllables present before and after, to great extent. The writing system is described as non-linear -- starting from a central syllable or idea and growing outwards in organic or artistic patterns, such that by the time the piece is completed the original central point may no longer be of particular importance. So -- this I thought of, of course, because of the discussion above about constellations and reinterpretation of meaning...

< kaberett> also this was my afternoon: https://twitter.com/XanderSalamandr/status/359772662995750912
< kaberett> [...] so this was the second day running I had heard noises as of a pigeon being kind of useless behind the gas fire, in the blocked-off fireplace
< kaberett> I'd started out hoping that it would find its own way out
< kaberett> on hearing it today I decided it clearly hadn't, and I should Do Something about it
< kaberett> I persuaded baby brother and houseguest that they wanted to be useful to complement my faffing slightly uselessly
< kaberett> so we moved the fire forward
< kaberett> and pried up the board blocking off the fireplace along one edge
< kaberett> and saw nothing.
< kaberett> so we sat and waited a bit
< kaberett> and eventually a pigeon reappeared.
< kaberett> and I looked at it, and it looked at me, through the gap
< kaberett> and it looked sad and bedraggled
< kaberett> so I went and got (a) some pumpkin seeds and (b) a couple of flowerpots
< kaberett> and laid a trail of seeds from inside the fireplace to inside the flowerpots
< kaberett> and it eagerly consumed the seeds inside the fireplace
< kaberett> then turned itself in baffled circles for a while.
< kaberett> and occasionally peered out.
< kaberett> and finally nerved itself to push its way out into the LIGHT in spite of the people.
< kaberett> ... it proceeded to not go into the flowerpot, having apparently had enough of dark confined spaces, regardless of how many pumpkin seeds they ontained.
< kaberett> it crouched, instead, in between the wall and the flowerpot, for a little while, eying me with GREAT SUSPICION.
< kaberett> and then it flew across the room, and sat sadly on the windowsill staring out of the window.
< kaberett> Xander has kept birds.
< kaberett> Xander calmly walked over and picked it up.
< kaberett> I opened the front door.
< kaberett> Xander took it outside and gave it a boost.
< kaberett> And off it flew, slightly bedraggled but looking VERY HAPPY to be in sunshine again.