Reading

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Available on Steam and Itch.io for the low low price of free:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2240530/BABBDI/
https://lemaitre-bros.itch.io/babbdi

The description says it's a short game but I've spent over 10 hours happily wandering around in it and there's definitely more to do.

Immensely satisfying traversal and exploration of a brutalist concrete cityscape full of weird nooks and hidden places to discover, using a series of different movement tools (as well as your own ability to jump) -- including a baseball bat (hit a surface to propel yourself in the opposite direction, including hitting the ground to go UP), leaf blower, motorcycle, pickaxe (climb any vertical walls by jumping and stabbing the pickaxe in, then repeating) and propeller, all of which are enormous fun to use.

(You can only carry one tool at a time, but there are multiple iterations of them scattered around the map, and if you lose something, after a while -- possibly requiring quitting and reloading, not sure -- it'll tend to respawn where you originally found it.)

None of the platforming has required more co-ordination than I have; there are things I could undoubtedly do more easily if I was a better platformer, but finding the right tool can get me there anyway.

And if you can see somewhere, it's real and you can get there, and often you'll discover things to see or collect there. Maybe you'll crawl through a sewer and discover a secret underground dance party. Maybe you'll randomly run across a hidden room that looks at first glance like it's monitoring surveillance cameras but turns out on closer inspection to be running Windows on multiple microwaves. Even the invisible wall round what appears to be the edge of the map has a gap in it, and you can sneak through it to get to the ship you can see in the distance; it's not a skybox.

No fall damage, no ticking clock, no combat, no jumpscares. The vibe is ambient vaguely-dystopian melancholic creepiness, but within that people are going about their lives. I'm reminded of the origins of parkour in the neglected brutalist concrete environments of social housing in France.

Weird, relaxing, delightful.

(For anyone wondering, yes I am still very much playing Dark Souls, but I can only do so in moderate amounts per day, when I have mental energy, so I mix it up with other things too.)

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"However much candy you want, the answer is yes."

23 trick-or-treaters this year, likely due to rain and construction. The last four were after we had started picking up and bringing things inside, and in fact after we'd sorted the candy into Keep and Share. (The Share candy stays outside overnight for the late crew, then goes with Belovedest to work. We don't have particularly much trouble with raccoons.) In the last party, the one with the umbrella hat and some sort of Studio Ghibli makeup (white face, red eye triangles) was enchanted with the glow sticks and picked one of the very few blue ones.

This year's innovation was doing the Wizard of Oz + Dark Side of the Moon thing with (much less cleverly timed) Chaos Emergency Doof Broadcast (Which is 4 hours of very silly DJ work), some of the Halloween episodes, with Addams Family Values on mute (several times through). We got the inflammable tango to "The Devil Went Down to Georgia", and a few other silly confluences. I think this is one of the ones where precise timing doesn't help all that much, but it's great when it happens. By the time the show had run out of explicitly spooky songs, it got a little less entertaining.

Belovedest was Jigglypuff. I was a very tired Dulcie (wearing my own nightgown and some exhaustion makeup). I ordered the wrong crust on 2 out of 3 pizzas, and the 3rd one was gluten free.

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Darren Korb - Death to Chronos

Yet More Along The March To Foolishness - Late October 02025

Let's begin with the understanding that many more people are using computing and the Internet than those who have able bodies. (And they're also trying to use public infrastructure as well.) So let's talk about what people think screen readers do, and what they actually do, and re-commit yourselves to building things that are accessible from the ground up, so that everyone can use a website, a document, or enjoy a picture that you have taken or created, even if they are not a sighted user.

Furthermore, Consumer Reports offers the easiest way to turn off LLM and other supposed "intelligence" features on your computers and devices, which we offer with the additional understanding that every time you update your device, you may have to repeat these steps, as many of the companies that have poured all this money into supposed intelligence are very put out when people turn them off, and will silently turn them back on every time you update.

As the population ages, the lack of information for people going through menopause means there's people to be exploited, according to plenty of companies that intend to do the exploiting. Because, after all, there's still a prevalent assumption that a woman loses all her value once she stops being able to breed the next generation. And an equally prevalent idea that you can just slap a purple color or the word menopause on anything, including a personal massager, and roll in the dough.

A plot of land purchased by the Cards Against Humanity game owners to stymie construction of a border wall was also used to obtain a settlement against SpaceX for trespassing and using the land without permission for their operations. For their troubles, those who contributed to the land purchase will receive a pack of CAH specifically about Elon Musk, owner of SpaceX and general blight upon humanity.

Thieves made off with several pieces of jewelry held by the Louvre museum, having used a truck-mounted ladder to climb the outside and then break into both windows and high-security cases to take the jewels.

A bunch of techbros put together a SlutCon, with the nominal idea of making sure that these bros would have practice at flirting and behaving acceptably toward women in potentially sexual or romantic situations. There were women there as "flirt girls" for the attendees to practice on. There were, of course, several tiers of VIP membership to get as well, which suggests, along with the article, that this may not have been so much about learning how to flirt and to treat women as people, but instead about treating romance and sex as a min-maxing experience and giving them more tools on how to do this. Which would make it more an enabling experience instead of an enlightening one.

Proving their willingness to commit to the bit, no matter how many obvious mistakes are being made nor how much harm it causes, A cisgender boy with a mistake on his birth certificate declaring him female is being barred from participating in boys' sports, boys' gym classes, and using the boys restroom, because the way the statute and policy have been written, they only count the original birth certificate as valid, even if the certificate has been amended since, or was issued in error, and the school says that genetic testing might help make the boy eligible for boys' sports, but it wouldn't be a guarantee. (And it would also be an expensive prospect for such things.) From the way the article is written, it sounds like the school is treating the boy like he's a trans boy and that they want him to be comfortable being the girl that his birth certificate says he is. So, in Arizona, the TERFs' greatest nightmare is coming to pass - there's a biological male allowed to play sports with females, share locker room facilities, and the school is actively facilitating it. Remarkable commitment to the bit over using any kind of common-sense measure, because they're so worried that someone else might use those same common-sense measures to make sure a child is playing in the correct sport for their gender.

The concept of the border as a religious object, because of the way that borders can exist in multiple spaces and frames at once, their liminality, and their way to delineate spaces.

( And now a lot of politics bits. At least you can be assured you'r3e a terrorist now. )

Last out for tonight, Gary Larsen, of The Far Side, has apparently taken up making some new things, with digital drawing tools. Including one for the recently departed Dr. Goodall, showing her as having a reserved seat at a chimpanzee club.

The argument for allowing children to go play in the streets and on the sidewalks in addition to the parks and playgrounds, because the streets are often closer to home, and because the presence of play in those places is a pushback against the idea that streets and sidewalks are only meant for those going from one place to another.

(Materials via

adrian_turtle,

azurelunatic,

boxofdelights,

cmcmck,

conuly,

cosmolinguist,

elf,

finch,

firecat,

jadelennox,

jenett,

jjhunter,

kaberett,

lilysea,

oursin,

rydra_wong,

snowynight,

sonia,

the_future_modernes,

thewayne,

umadoshi,

vass, the

meta_warehouse community,

little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

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Daily Happiness

1. Still not covid. Fingers crossed it stays that way. My symptoms seem to have skipped the sinus stage and just went directly from sore throat to chest congestion, which is similar to a cold I had last year. I don't love chest congestion (always a bit worried something will lurk in there and turn into bronchitis or pneumonia) but I really hate being stuffed up, so I'm happy to not be right now. I feel fine otherwise, a little tired. Worked from home again today, though aside from a meeting this morning and answering some emails and messages, I didn't really do a lot of actual work.

2. The heat spell is over and it was very pleasant today. We took a midday walk and though the sun was bright, it wasn't too hot. A little breezy. Very nice weather for a walk.

3. We have been doing this Star Wars Halloween countdown calendar we got from Disneyland and the figures are so cute! Next year we can just put them up as decorations from the beginning, but it was fun to open one each day, ending on the 31st (there are thirteen total because spooky).

We kept them on what's left of the mantel lol (just a narrow ridge of bricks since we removed the wood). I wouldn't want to put anything delicate up there, breakable or legos or such, but these are sturdy plastic figures so even if the cats had knocked them down, they wouldn't be damaged, but no one touched them.

And a closeup:

4. I love how this yawn looks like he's frantically trying to warn someone about something.

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weekly reading

Weekly Reading

Recently Finished
Breathless Homicidal Slime Mutants: The Art of the Paperback
Found this in a neighborhood Little Library. Not much text, so it's a fast read. Mostly just pictures of old paperback book covers. It was fun to look at as something I got for free. Wouldn't buy it, though.

We Live Here Now
A woman and her husband move to an isolated old house after she's released from the hospital following a nearly fatal accident. From the beginning, there are strange goings on, but while the MC thinks the house might be haunted, her husband is convinced she's just hallucinating as a symptom of her post-sepsis syndrome. Spoiler alert: it's haunted. I think this was one of the most interesting haunted house stories I've read and I really liked the twists.

The Killings at Badger's Drift
First novel in the series the Midsomer Murders show is based on. I don't usually go for mysteries with male protags, especially policemen, but this was on a two-for-one Audible sale and I've heard go things about the show, so I decided to check it out. I like the MC all right and the mystery was interesting. Did not like that the stereotypes regarding the lone gay character, though this was published in the late 80s, so somewhat to be expected. The narrator was enjoyable. I am interested in checking out more in the series, but neither my library nor Hoopla has further audiobooks, so I'll just get book books, as I wasn't into it enough to want to spend money on it.

Chef's Secret
Most recent book in the Front Desk series of middle grade novels about a tween (now teen) Chinese-American girl who works at her family's motel. I really liked the earlier books but this one was such a disappointment. There had been little bits of romance between the MC and her male best friend in the previous couple books, but this one was not only entirely romance focused, but was from the POV of said boy, rather than the previous MC. I do not like him as a narrator and just found the romance plot of thirteen-year-olds dreadfully boring. It seems like this might be the last book in the series, but if it's not, I'll probably check out the summary/reviews before reading any further books rather than just automatically checking it out. I prefer MG over YA precisely because of the lack of romance focus (I don't mind books where the main plot is a romance, though it's not my favorite genre, but so much YA theoretically has another plot but it's actually all about choosing between two cute boys or whatever), so having it be the main plot here was a disappointment.

Yellow Stringer
This was a Hoopla bonus read or whatever they call it. Previously my library allowed you to check out six things a month with Hoopla, but recently it was cut down to four, so I assume Hoopla increased their prices or something and the library had to go down to a lower tier. Disappointing, but since I'd reached my max, I checked out the list of things you can borrow without having it count towards your total, and this was one of them. Not sure I would have checked it out otherwise. It's an English language comic done in manga style (specifically it very much reminds me of Detective Conan). A reporter for a tabloid is one of the few people who knows the articles she writes are about real supernatural events, rather than just sensational stories. Her new partner is a former cop who is sceptical until mummies start attacking them. The first several chapters are part of one longer story, and then there's a few more stand-alones. They're all just fine. It says volume one, but it's been several years and no sign of any further volumes, so it's probably abandoned. It was fine, but not something I'll bother checking up on to see if any more are ever released.

My Home Hero vol. 5-6

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Music: you know it's not the same as it was

Entry tags:

if the stars were edible

hyounpark pinged me from BART this morning with the sad news that Fugakyu is closing, after 27 years.

It feels like I've been going there forever, even though honestly the last time I went there was probably when we still lived in Boston. But I'm like 80% certain I've gone on dates there with all of my major boyfriends (if I dated you for at least a year, that's the defining line in my headcanon). A bazillion times with

hyounpark during our Boston era. Plenty of times with

noghri, both while we were dating and then when we became friends. I thought I'd brought

kallmir2000 there, but I double-checked and it was Ginza I was thinking of. Which, admittedly, I'd also eaten sushi at with even more of the people I've dated, hahaha, including both Punsterboy and Choirboy! 😁 (Even though Ginza's been gone for well over a decade now.) And

theconvictor and I had our Valentines' Day 2000 dinner at Fugakyu when we spent the weekend in Boston on a romantic getaway from campus, feeling ever so grownup, removing our shoes to sit at one of the traditional low tables in the fancy embedded booths.

Fugakyu was even where I introduced multiple friends to sushi (

fes42,

jennifer,

david_grana, Adam); where my girlfriends took me after devastating breakups and meh second dates, because sushi would be followed up by ice cream at JP Licks, and then a visit to a certain little shop down the way (also long gone, alas; I'm hoping this recent rise in romance-specific bookstores brings an appropriate replacement to the neighborhood) because that was definitely better than moping over guys!

And now it's closing, for "personal reasons."

Damn, am I gonna miss their pinetato (pineapple and sweet potato) maki. And the kinuta. And the hotate hokkayaki. And the giant boats of sushi that I would split with my friends. I know where to get sushi; honestly I may just pop down to our neighborhood sushi joint before the trick-or-treaters start arriving. But mostly, finding out that Fugakyu is closing next week is just making me miss everyone in Boston. Even knowing that many of the friends I mentioned don't live there anymore, like us.

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(no subject)

Happy Spooky Season from us at Wiscon!

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Daily Happiness

1. I worked from home again today, which was nice, but the reason was not so much. I'm sick again. D: Yesterday afternoon I started to feel a tickle in my throat that just continued throughout the evening, but it was super dry yesterday so it was the sort of thing that could have just been due to the weather. Unfortunately when I woke up this morning it was definitely more of a proper sore throat. So far testing negative for covid, but I'll keep checking. (I will say that the time last year when we actually did have covid, it showed up on the tests right away. But I know it doesn't always, so I won't take an early negative as a sure thing.)

2. Our new coffee table arrived and is all set up! It was not a full DIY table like Ikea, just had to attach the legs, so it was very quick to do.

3. Finished up another puzzle today. This is one of the ones we got at Target recently. It's 500 pieces but felt easier than a lot of the other ones of that size we've done, though the foil made it annoying at times since the light would kind of glare off it.

4. Jasper is such a handsome guy.

today my most important job was Pointy Objects

I supplied knives and fine motor control; the toddler supplied art direction; the toddler's resident adults supplied outlines for me to cut around (and candles, and matches, and in fact all of the cutting of the tiny pumpkin).

one large and one small pumpkin, carved, with candles, in the dark

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Daily Happiness

1. I had a dentist appointment today (just a cleaning) and didn't want to go to work afterwards, so I just worked from home. Today is the hottest day of our heatwave, but it wasn't too hot in the house and I even took a walk in the afternoon, which I definitely wouldn't have been able to do at work because it's hotter down there plus there's hardly any shade in the neighborhood whereas the streets right around our house have a lot of tree coverage even midday.

2. Carla made pot roast for dinner. It was in the slow cooker, so it didn't heat up the house too much. It turned out really tasty! Haven't had pot roast in ages. It would have been nicer if the weather was still cool, but it still tasted good.

3. When Carla was moving stuff around to put books in her new bookcase, she moved some stuff out of this other bookcase and as soon as her back was turned, Chloe came to settle on the middle shelf lol.

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on pain of pain

[pain] working on an articulation

I have, in the latest book, got to The Obligatory Page And A Half On Descartes, but this one makes a point of describing it as a "reductionistic approach".

The Thing Is, of course, that much like the Bohr model (for all that's 250 years younger, give or take), for many and indeed quite plausibly most purposes, The Cartesian Model Of Pain is, for most people and for most purposes, good enough: if you've got to GCSE level then you'll have met the Bohr model; if you get to A-level, you'll start learning about atomic orbitals; and then by the time I was starting my PhD I had to throw out the approximation of atomic nuclei as volumeless points (the reason you get measurable and interpretable stable isotope fractionations of thallium is -- mostly! -- down to the nuclear field shift effect).

Similarly, most of the time you don't actually need to know anything beyond the lie-to-children first-approximation of "if you're experiencing pain, that means something is damaging you, so work out what it is and stop doing that". The Bohr model is good enough for a general understanding of atomic bonds and chemical reactions; specificity theory is good enough for day-to-day encounters with acute pain.

The problem with specificity theory isn't actually that it's wrong (although it is); it's that it gets misapplied in cases where Something More Complicated is going on in ways that obscure even the possibility of Something More Complicated. The problem, as far as I'm concerned, is that it doesn't get presented with the footnote of "this isn't the whole story, and for understanding anything beyond very short-term acute pain you need to go into considerably more detail". But most people aren't in more complex pain than that! Estimates run at ~20% of the population living with chronic pain, but even if we accept the 43% that sometimes gets quoted about the UK, most people do not live with chronic pain.

There's probably an analogy here with the "Migraine Is Not Just A Bad Headache" line (and indeed I'm getting increasingly irritated with all of these books discussing migraine as though the problem is solely and entirely the pain, as opposed to, you know, the rest of the disabling neurological symptoms) but I'm upping my amitriptyline again and it's past my bedtime so I'm not going to work all the details of that out now, but, like, Pain Is Not Just A Tissue Damage, style of thing.

Anyway. The point is that I still haven't actually read Descartes (I've got the posthumously published and much more posthumously translated Treatise on Man in PDF, I just haven't got to it yet) and nonetheless I am bristling at people describing him as reductionist (derogatory). Just. We aren't going to do better if we also persist in wilful misunderstandings and misrepresentations for the sake of slagging off someone who has been dead for three hundred and seventy-five years instead of recognising the actual value inherent in "good enough for most people most of the time", and how that value complicates attempts at more nuance! How about we actually acknowledge the reasons the idea is so compelling, huh, and discuss the circumstances under which the approximation holds versus breaks down? How about that for an idea.

Entry tags:

icons,
icons:pikmin

Pikmin Icons

Purple Pikmin in an airplain, next to a pikmin with a Carreg Dhu mountain badge.

Photo of Grafitti saying Peace Monkey Graffit, Withingon, Manchester, with two pickmin with yellow flowers on their heads down the front.

Bunch of Mii's in a mixture of outfits, most with sunglasses, celebrating 100063 steps.

View of a road layout showing a red mushroom, and various planters.

A blue pikmin an a 3 cupcake holding a cherry

It's remarkably difficult, at least I find it so, to take screenshots of one's iPhone. As a result capturing good images of Pikmin proced challenging.

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Daily Happiness

1. Back to work today was fine. Morning was mainly catching up on email/messages and I had a meeting in the afternoon, but otherwise just had time to myself to get stuff done.

2. I brought home sushi from work for dinner and it was very tasty. There's a seared salmon sushi that all our stores carry and Carla often gets from the location nearest us, but that location doesn't have an in-store kitchen and gets all their packaged food delivered. But the Gardena location makes it in-house and theirs tastes so much better (at least in my opinion; Carla didn't notice that much of a difference). They go heavy with the blowtorch to sear them and you can really taste the grill flavor.

3. So far this week's heatwave has not been as bad as predicted. Hopefully that holds true for the rest of the week! (It's supposed to be back to cool weather this weekend.)

4. Gemma has perfected the disapproving look.

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knotts

2025 Knott's Trip #2 (10/27/25)

We keep thinking about how we should go to Knott's, but never going. We've only been once this year, during the Boysenberry Festival, and we really did want to check it out during Halloween, but their hours are so limited (even on nights when they don't have Scary Farm (which is not only a separate ticketed event, but one we have zero interest in), they close at like 6pm, which makes a dinner trip difficult to plan. But I had the day off yesterday, so we went down for lunch.

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Milestone

Video appointment with chemotherapist today. I'm done with immunotherapy! The scan says I've been stable.

I still have:

* bone strengthening (not marrow encouraging) med every 12 weeks, infused
* Scans every 3 months

So that means a trip or two to the cancer center every 3 months, although if they keep it at 3 months for the one and 12 weeks for the other, they may fall out of sync.

I should probably celebrate this?

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[link] EXPASS best practice guidelines published!

Sarah Russell of The Ostomy Studio, the person who made such an enormous difference to my general State Of Being just over a year ago via the medium of a private Pilates lesson pre-surgery, has just announced publication of the new Exercise and Physical Activity after Stoma Surgery best practice guidelines that she's been working on for literal years along with some amazing collaborators!

The principles here are the bedrock for the private lesson I had before surgery, and are also what I used as my foundation for rehab despite not after all needing to work with a stoma; I've not read them in full, but if you know folk they might be of interest to then please do pass the link on <3

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Donna Icons

Donna, from Doctor Who, looking compassionate

Donna, from Doctor Who, waist up in a pink striped shirt with cardigan over it. Blue scenery behind.

Donna from Doctor Who operating the Tardis.

Donna from Doctor Who. Head and shoulders and it is windy.

monday handstands did not happen

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

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Daily Happiness

1. We went to Knott's Berry Farm for lunch today! This is actually only the second time we've gone this year. ^_^;; It just feels like there's never a good time to go, since there's not much we're interested in doing there other than checking out the food. We plan to go again a time or two during the Christmas season (especially during the last ten days of the year when we're blocked out from Disneyland), but I don't think we'll renew our pass next year.

The food is so good and if we lived closer, it would make sense to just pop in whenever, but the park hours suck, so we can't do early mornings or later in the evening like we do with Disneyland to avoid the crowds, the parking situation is often bad, and there is nowhere in the park to escape the constant noise of rollercoasters. Plus the park is so small that you don't really get that satisfying a walk out of it. I will miss the food, though! Next year we're thinking of maybe getting a Universal Studios pass and seeing how we like that (we'll go once to try it out first as neither of us have ever been).

2. It was nice to have an extra day off. Not super looking forward to going back to work tomorrow, but on the bright side, now it's just a four day week!

3. Tuxie tried to hide behind the charcoal when I went out to garage lol.

Entry tags:

disney

2025 Disneyland Trip #69 (10/26/25) Oogie Boogie Bash

We skipped the majority of the mix-in time and got into the park a little after five. There were still some non-event guests, but going by the amount of costumes, it was mostly other Oogie Boogie folks already.

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