My mental health therapist is retiring. In the next few weeks I'm scheduled for "brief consults" with possible successors.
I've got a couple questions prepared, and I'd love to know what I don't know to ask.
Have you interviewed therapists? Was there a question/comment which proved useful (or harmful)?
Ugh I’ve got a chest cold which could mean endless coughing. The good news is I have a recliner for sleeping mostly upright, and copious amounts of guaifenesin-pills-and-water, and the right sort of social network.
When I woke up early, I commanded Siri #4 to narrate amaruuk’s sweet Rosie & Johnlock series Paternity
Got a phone call from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kestrell
Hopped on here, and tozka linked me to an excellent concert from Cathy Fink, Marcie Marxer and Chao Tian, hosted by the Smithsonian. Fink & Marxer were role models when I was a "movement musician" between 1976-1981, and I love how closely Chinese yangqin (hammered dulcimer) and Appalachian banjo music can intertwine
Today’s prettygoodword was the wonderful campanulate
minoanmiss shared strategies for smuggling the good bacteria past TSA
My public library’s Kanopy subscription provided two profound films, both under nine minutes:
CODA is an animated short from 2015. This Irish masterpiece follows a lost soul’s encounter with death. Pro captions, no audio description, no gore. Watch on YouTube or ( stream here )
Bacon & God’s Wrath meditates on loss of faith when Razie Brownstone, at age 92, tries bacon for the first time. CONTAINS: Very lifelike animated dead pig’s head, racist autocomplete results, emesis mentioned. Watch on YouTube without captions or ( stream here )
Help Me Host a Watch Part for Your Fat Friend
I loved this excellent documentary about Aubrey Gordon, fatness, family, the complexities of change, and the messy feelings we hold about our bodies. Over six years, director Jeanie Finlay follows Gordon from anonymous blogger yrfatfriend in 2016 to bestselling 2020 writer of What We Talk About When We Don’t Talk About Fat and beloved Maintenance Phase podcaster with an audience of millions.
Aubrey Gordon urges a paradigm shift in how we view fat people and the fat on our own bodies. I cheered and cried while watching the movie, as it shows Gordon’s strength (and love of her body in water) while also demonstrating her family’s ambiguous support and documenting the abuse she experiences daily, both online and off. It’s got pro captions and audio description (but no AD in the trailer).
Trailer on YouTube https://youtu.be/lodyin_6x3c
( stream it here )
I want to host a free online watch party, but I’ve never done this. I’m willing to subsidize the license fee. Are you the tech whiz who can help make this happen?
The tasks I imagine:
If you have experience organizing asynchronous, time-limited, online movie showings, and are willing to help spread Aubrey Gordon’s message, please let me know — here or via DW’s direct messaging.
Skyview skyview.social lets you view and share Bluesky threads without needing an account. It offers a tree view, as well as an unrolled (all replies) and embed (haven’t tested it). Plus bots to save all of those; claims to track nothing.
I’d offer an example but even the briefest time on Bsky today has crashed my news wall like woe.
Excellent tool for managing time zone information https://dateful.com
The link you create a link automagically translates an event’s time to the user’s current time zone and day. When you create a free account, you can edit those links.
For example, a Media & Disability Communication Online Con
Seen on electric signboard on US Highway 12/18 E just south of Madison, 23 November 2024
Make it to deer camp safely buckle up
resonant revises John Henry for the modern day:
The Ballad of John Henry's CEO
You can't fight fate, gotta automate,
Keep the cost of production down, lord, lord,
The cost of production down.
First published in 2012, still relevant as fuck.
I’ve always known that the most stressful equipment failure is when something breaks on my powerchair.
Previously, I would have put computing equipment in second place, but today I learned a new contender: when my tea kettle won’t turn on! Thankfully MyGuy recognized I was in anxious mode, and the store had a replacement, and all is well.
Well, all is .... I have tea.
mdbear led me to Switching.Software, a site that offers free, open-source alternatives to the services run by billionaires who are making bad policy decisions. (Whistles loudly to blot out discussions of the choices they’re making)
solarbird explains how Mastodon and Bluesky users can follow each other through a "bridge"
https://solarbird.dreamwidth.org/2021328.html
The annual ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
snowflake_challenge is underway. Following the tag from DW’s "latest things" is a good way to meet new people and reconnect with old pals. petra answered the best canon prompt by linking to Slings & Arrows, season 1, episode 3. The version they linked to is ODavies’s passion project of upscaling older shows and movies in glorious 4K. They look good, and at least Slings & Arrows’s captions survived the transfer (although many ks display as js)
Although I’ve been deploying pacing strategies to manage my chronic illness (CFS/ME) for 30 years, thanks to sonia for sharing this NHS video, which claims that true resting to recharge the parasympathetic nervous system requires no reading. This is a shocker for me, since I routinely listen to (admittedly low effort) audiobooks and podfics when resting.
How to rest properly to help recovery: watch on YouTube w A+ captions
Finally, this boomer realizes she’s living in the future: I’ve got a new mutual subscriber barbaratp. She writes in Brazilian Portuguese; I have no language even close. Yet we can mutually understand each other thanks to machine translation. (Of course there are glitches, and thankfully we’re humans and can double check that messages received is the message sent.)
Better than flying cars, really.
Any lovely things you've found here and wish to share?
ETA: 24 May 2025 correct pronouns
Listening to a new performer handling a well-known tune is my favorite introduction to their style and philosophy. Of course there’s a website for that: Second Hand Songs. Here’s their data on the lovely tune "Blues Run the Game," which you may have learned from Simon & Garfunkel if you’re a boomer.
beatrice_otter points out that the Harassment Policy statement in the revised Terms of Service draft does nothing to protect fans from harassing "gift fics." Very useful discussion at that post!
Per an email from OTW a couple weeks back, I learned that they’re updating the Terms of Service (TOS) for Archive of our Own (AO3).
They finally address requests for including warnings for Hate Speech, Racism, Slavery at some length, but they’ve hidden the discussion deep in a draft.
tl;dr — No new warnings. Only a handful of people have commented. They’re soliciting comments until 17 November 2024. The rest of this post is linked excerpts from OTW’s reasoning against warnings, and from folks who've commented.
( 900 words )
pudding.cool hosts remarkable visualizations of a wide, wide range of data. As their front page boasts:
The Pudding is a digital publication that
explains ideas debated in culture with visual essaysmakes cool shit on the internet. You might have seen our story on women’s pockets, but we’ve also made stuff about mapping famous people and celebrity name spelling.
The point of the site is making aesthetically pleasing data visualization, and the design withstands being zoomed up to 175%. I can’t speak to its accessibility otherwise. What’s revved me up this time is
Extensive data visualization of relationship patterns in fanfic on the AO3. They quote thinkers I’ve enjoyed in the past — Kristina Busse and Joanna Russ among many — and as a treat, they host a random relationship generator at the top of the page.
( 125 word snippet )
https://pudding.cool/2024/10/fanfic
The Oxford English Dictionary was an early fandom for me — our family squabbled over who got the magnifying glass when the Compact OED arrived in 1971. (It squeezed 20 volumes into two by making the print tiny — essentially a paper microfiche.) So I was charmed by Dr Catherine Sangster’s article "Looking back at Geek Dictionary Corner"
( 125 word sample )
https://www.oed.com/discover/looking-back-at-geek-dictionary-cornerAnd there’s more…
Thursday, November 21, 2024
1700 UTC (11:00 a.m. central US & Canada)
Join editors Dr Catherine Sangster and Fiona McPherson, and guest speakers Prof Dr Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer and Dr Fraser Dallachy for a discussion on the language of science fiction, fantasy, gaming, and other specific fandoms:
• How and why language that develops in these communities is adopted more widely
• How does the OED monitor these developments, and decide what should (or should not) be recorded
• Interesting examples
• The influence of World Englishes varieties and other languages
• Q&A time – bring your questions to the panellists or send them in advance to oed.uk@oup.com
Sign up to watch live https://events.oup.com/oup-academic-marketing/OED-pop-culture.
Will probably show up on OxfordLanguages’s YouTube channel.
I've adored the writing of wordstrings in BBC Sherlock. I was delighted to learn a decade ago that the same person, writing as Katie Forsythe, created many excellent fanfics in the Arthur Conan Doyle canon. Those used to be hosted at liquidfic.org, but that domain parted ways with the author.
Today I got a AO3 notification that wordstrings didn't have backups of the Katie Forsythe work, so asked if someone had saved the stories locally, and if they'd be willing to share them with other interested parties.
Of course scores of fans stepped up, and it's clear those works will be back on the internet soon.
I did some random searching, and was very surprised to learn another of wordstring's works, the Paradox Series, still at the AO3, is also available for free via the no-DRM-ebook-only publisher Smashwords, which offers pdb and lrf formats, in addition to the pdf, mobi, and epub formats hosted here.
So I guess some folks use Smashwords to host fanfic?
(And there's one further complication: the liquidfic.org stories are on the Wayback Machine, BUT the Internet Archive is offline because they're dealing with a DDoS attack. According to the Archive's founder, it will be "days not weeks" before they'll be back up.)
I just listened to a This American Life episode (audio or transcript) where David Kestenbaum, an experienced science journalist, kvelled about how awesome Chat GPT is, how they are truly approaching AGI—artificial general intelligence. His turning point was that the large language model was trained on text, and wrote its own graphic-generating program when prompted to show an image. And that's pretty cool, but ...
I asked ChatGPT-4o some super-basic questions about my family history, all documented in US Census data. The results were stunningly bad.
My maternal grandfather's cousin was Richard Neutra, who was a well-known modern architect. ChatGPT-4o insisted that everyone in my family was related to him--that my maternal grandmother was really married to him. It would show accurate 1940 Census data—-my maternal grandmother with her actual name and and then say, but no, my grandmother was actually married to famous person and my mother was his daughter.
It answered an identical census question incorrectly and then correctly in immediate succession.
As erinptah has been diligently documenting, "AI" is simply not there yet, although this hasn't prevented everybody and their dog claiming it as the absolute new hotness.
I acknowledge that I have no technical qualifications to assess the relevance of these hallucinated answers to the overall reliability of "AI". I welcome new knowledge!
Wow I loved this doc! Is there anybody out there?, 87 minutes, UK, 2023. Directed by Ella Glendining, in English with precise captions and audio description.
Blurb:
Born with a rare disability, filmmaker Ella Glendining wonders if there is anyone who can share the experience of living in a body like hers. This simple question—one which non disabled people take for granted, leads to a journey to not only others who live like her—but to the realization that meeting them changes how she views herself in the world, as well as many surprises along the way.
Glendining includes archival footage of her own childhood (older videotapes with flashing lights across the bottom of the screen) as well as horrifying evidence of rank bigotry that disabled kids in the UK. She talks about loving bodies, her own and others’. She documents accepting parenting from her own youth and with her own child, as well as the challenges of wanting to have a "perfect birth" (no drugs, no knives). She demonstrates access intimacy and cross-disability solidarity, interacts with one great doctor and one surgeon-on-a-mission to normalize kids through massive pain, and finally answers the title question yes! meeting three people with bodies similar to hers. I got bi vibes from the doc but I don’t remember her explicitly coming out. In this extensive interview at Diva Magazine, she does explore her bisexuality: https://diva-magazine.com/2023/11/13/ella-glendining-is-there-anybody-out-there/.
I want every parent of a kid with orthopedic impairments to watch this film today, before they ponder any more "treatments." It would also be a great discussion starter for a classroom or activist group.
erinptah collates amusing and horrifying examples of large language models ("AI") spewing nonsense after they steal the hard work of artists like herself:
https://erinptah.dreamwidth.org/tag/artificial+unintelligence
ysabetwordsmith posted eighteen subtle and beautiful eclipse shots at the "share your photos" community common_nature
https://common-nature.dreamwidth.org/253608.html
jenroses’s Fork Theory is a most excellent complement to spoon theory
http://jenrose.com/fork-theory/
You know the phrase, “Stick a fork in me, I’m done,” right?
Well, Fork Theory is that one has a Fork Limit, that is, you can probably cope okay with one fork stuck in you, maybe two or three, but at some point you will lose your shit if one more fork happens.
A fork could range from being hungry or having to pee to getting a new bill or a new diagnosis of illness. There are lots of different sizes of forks, and volume vs. quantity means that the fork limit is not absolute. I might be able to deal with 20 tiny little escargot fork annoyances, such as a hangnail or slightly suboptimal pants, but not even one “you poked my trigger on purpose because you think it’s fun to see me melt down” pitchfork.
Finally, this pro-captioned video summarizes the findings from an Hungarian research paper published last month in Cell. It supports that dogs make mental representations of human words.
stream on YouTube or … ( stream here )
Boros, Magyari et al. (2024) Neural evidence for referential understanding of object words in dogs https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2024.02.029
I appreciate the eloquent exploration of the social model of disability by Sunaura Taylor and Judith Butler as they stroll through San Francisco, with bonus thrifting (on YouTube no CC) and transcript. It’s an excerpt from Astra Taylor’s EXAMINED LIFE, a documentary featuring 9 philosophers walking and talking.
Someone on Ask.Metafilter needed book title text that punned on kitchen topics. Snarky MeFites delivered better than GrubHub, UberEats, and DoorDash combined. Amuse bouche:
I still haven’t seen Barbie yet, but I’ve enjoyed disabled people’s commentary!
Dr Therí A Pickens (on Medium) declares Disability Access in Barbieland Holds Up a Sober Mirror to Our World
archived
Poet Johnson Cheu explains why Becky Declines Barbie’s Dinner Invitation both print and audio. He’s referring to 1997’s Share-A-Smile Becky who comes with her own pink wheelchair. Travel blogger Karin Willison reviews all of the disabled Barbie-adjacent dolls.
...is an appropriate holiday entry, I reckon.
Hello world! I’ve been noodling along, counting down the days until the Winter Solstice and the return of more light, doing a whole lot of nothing.
Happily, a pal turned me on to Elle Cordova, a musician, filker, rapper, and very funny person (formerly known as Reina Del Cid).
No transcript, but beautifully open-captioned:
( Seasons Greetings from our little multinational empire )
Much more at:
and damn geeky aside about user heads
I'm finally used to Dreamwidth's @-sign userheads, and the socials go and change their URLs so that including the @ generates a 404, thusly: ElleCordova
https://thesqueakywheel.org lives to snarl about the bullshit disabled people in the US deal with daily. Today's headline feed, for example:
[Image of van's rear window, with white sticker evoking a chalkboard scrawl of 4 humans and the sole of a human foot with a big frown]
( 150-word excerpt )
https://thesqueakywheel.org/2023/06/26/inclusive-stick-figure-family-features-womans-immortal-pressure-sore/sasha_feather dresses for the weatherwarm is the second-best[1] place to be as we see sasha_feather's lap, wrapped in a purple fleece throw, displaying the laptop lid covered in 26 excellent stickers
( Read more... )
My favorite is "No thanks I’m an indoor gay." I contributed the stylized pickle person who’s thinking "Kind of a big dill."
note 1: Best place to be is, of course, the internet.
Final photo from my pontoon boat adventures back in September.
Ten minutes after sunset, the black downtown skyline is highlighted by red, orange, yellow streaks quickly fading into a deep blue sky. The left-most passenger holds up a smartphone camera to capture a picture much like this one.
( Read more... )
I’m giving myself comment amnesty, because it’s the only way forward.
I enjoyed several pontoon rides towards the end of summer, in my birthday-month.
The locks on the Yahara River which connects Mendota (the big lake we visited in 2020) and Monona are under repair, so the pontoon rides were much smoother.
Photographic proof: Madison's low skyline is dark against the final orange sunset glow, dividing calm gray lake and cloudless blue sky:
( within the cut )
branchandroot