who only by moving can balance

Ableism, cissexism, biological essentialism, racism, etc, which I wish to vent about to a sympathetic audience.

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... okay I feel a bit better for having written that pile of nonsense down, good.

It was once, several years ago at this point, my intense displeasure to be party to a conversation in public space in the house I was living in at the time, where I was doing housework -- and actually, I say "conversation", but what I mean is "a middle-aged white guy who was a guest of one of my housemates was holding forth about his expertise in child language acquisition".

Astonishingly enough, he was wrong about everything. In particular, he literally claimed that children should be taught Esperanto instead of a natural language like French, because it's completely unfair and unreasonable to expect children to memorise tables of irregular verbs before they can have a conversation with their friends, and Esperanto doesn't require them to do that! It is, he said, ridiculous -- you give five-year-olds recorders, not bassoons.

(1) That isn't even how child language acquisition works (very different to language acquisition post-11, and third & subsequent languages are much much easier than the first couple),
(2) The reasons you don't give five-year-olds bassoons are that (i) they are extremely expensive, (ii) they're twice the height of most five-year-olds, and (iii) five-year-olds do not have the lung capacity because unlike violins where it is possible to make 1/8th-sizes at standard pitch by changing the tension of the strings the same cannot be said for a wind instrument,
(3) Actually giving 5yos recorders is preposterous, because while they're very easy to get a sound out of they're very hard to get a nice sound out of, see also "why on earth do we teach children to draw with wax crayons",
(4) There is absolutely no benefit from teaching children a constructed language rather than a natural language, especially not one that is not only so heavily based on Indo-European but the Romance family while claiming to give people an introduction to ~every language ever~,
(5) ... dudebro you just claimed Mandarin and Cantonese were IE languages I am so done with this conversation, please stop mansplaining linguistics to me and please for crying out loud stop encouraging schools to teach children Esperanto.

If you have ever heard me loudly exclaim bassoons are NOTHING like irregular verbs, you now know why.

COME AND SEE THE ABLEISM INHERENT IN THE SYSTEM

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... apparently there's photos of this one trans crip on buzzfeed.

I have registered! This means that, soon, hopefully, I will have journal access again. I believe it also means I am officially a member of aforementioned new institution. As such, I am trying to follow instructions to do... something... relating to an information systems account -- the instructions are really not terribly clear. SO FIRST: upon clicking the link to take you to the new place (which has to be a left click; no opening-in-new-tabs-via-any-other-mouse-buttons permitted around here) you get a pop-up prompt for your log-in details.

And then.

You get.

A second one.

And then the full horror is revealed unto you.

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IN SUM: dear Imperial, IE stopped having a controlling market share in browsers used on desktop machines in 2010 what are you even doing AND WILL YOU PAY ME CONSULTING RATES TO DO IT BETTER.

This is a screenshot of the "Fee to Pay" page on the Royal Mail website. Titles are obligatory. They offer six options, which are given (in order) as: Mr, Miss, Mrs, Ms, Dr, Sir.

This is a screenshot of the Contact Us form to which you are directed if you tell them that you have a problem with a Redelivery or paying a fee. Again, title is an obligatory field. It offers ten options, which are given (in order) as: Mr, Mrs, Ms, Miss, Mx, Dr, Lady, Rev, Lord, Sir.

I. CANNOT. EVEN.

Dear everyone who has ever recommended Sheri S Tepper to me: please don't ever do so again.

I have been pointed at a pretty damning review [SO MANY TRIGGER WARNING, see below], of which the best part is:

On top of all this, the sea level is rising rapidly - oh , not because of the icecaps melting for anthropogenic reasons, that happened already and wasn't so serious. This time, it's because ice comets which were trapped deep inside the Earth when it was still forming are melting and the water is seeping upwards, raising the sea levels to a point where only tall mountains will survive.

When I say "the best part", I mean the rest of it discusses paedophilia, cultural appropriation, ~fantasy-Asia~ and talking. rapist. horses. If you can face wading through that, though, then the (well-written!) review is very much worth a read if only for the squawks of horror you will undoubtedly emit. Seriously, people, we are talking OH JOHN RINGO NO levels of dire, here.

... as someone who's been repeatedly recced stuff by Tepper on the grounds of "trans* stuff" and "queer stuff", er. Well. Yeah. Put it this way, the only book of hers I've read was kind of gross about genderfluidity and three quarters of the queer characters died, never mind the fact that it was the kind of fantasy novel that The Colour Of Magic was written to spork, in which EVERYONE IS ALREADY CARRYING EVERYONE ELSE'S QUEST ITEMS.

edit: holy shit someone in comments at that posting points out that this person seriously advocates sterilising mentally ill people and sending them to concentration camps walled cities. WOW.

Oh, luteal phase. Oh, progesterone uptick. Oh, depressive downswing.

How I didn't miss you.

Medication review tomorrow, at which I will also get results of LEAST COMPETENT BLOOD SAMPLE EVAR. In general, the citalopram seems to be mostly doing a reasonable job of bringing my background mood up to "cheerful"; unfortunately 20mg doesn't seem to be enough when lolprogesterone. Unfortunately more than 20mg per day is contraindicated by the fact that I'm taking 20mg of omeprazole a day. Unfortunately I can't stop taking the omeprazole because of my long-term painkillers. Unfortunately, the citalopram might be making the painkillers less effective.

...

... on the plus side, I've just finished Braid, a game with a delightful time-travel mechanic and a REALLY OBNOXIOUS PLAYER CHARACTER. Luckily, you can mostly ignore the back story. (And I only cheated on two puzzles!)

(Other things I have played recently and heartily recommend apart from inevitable heterocentrism: Machinarium, an adorable steampunk point-and-click.)