Alas, new glucometer

Jul. 26th, 2025 05:40 pm
azurelunatic: "Sanity" St. John's Wort flower.  (the good drugs)
[personal profile] azurelunatic
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.)

I put up my middle finger at him.

Jul. 25th, 2025 10:52 pm
azurelunatic: Sorry! You were rude to me so now you get no hotdog. (vintage sign) (rude)
[personal profile] azurelunatic
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.
althea_valara: A screenshot of my main Final Fantasy XI character. It's a close up, and she's wearing the Teal Saio robe set which features a golden circlet. The character herself has black hair in a ponytail and brown eyes. (ffxi)
[personal profile] althea_valara
OKAY FOLKS! So, when the Jeuno raid dropped in FFXIV, I got strong nostalgia goggles for Final Fantasy XI, and returned to the game then. My goal? To replay the game's stories and document them so I wouldn't forget them again.

I am pleased to say that I have finished the first set of my documentation! It is here:

https://altheavalara.neocities.org/ffxi/bastok

And is a fan script of the Bastok city-state's rank 1 missions up to and including the rank 5 missions.

Now, this was originally the end of the base game's story, though they added additionally missions later. And each of the three city-states start out with different missions, but then there's a LOT of overlapping (some missions are exactly the same regardless of which city-state you're from.)

I'm proud of the fan script, but it's LONG, and not everyone wants to read dialogue. So I decided to write a summary. It's... also still long, but shorter than the actual game script. Plus it was a fun exercise to explain the story.

Anyway, it's under the cut. ENJOY!

ExpandRead more... )

Riders on the what?

Jul. 22nd, 2025 04:22 pm
azurelunatic: Hacker-Kitty (aka Yellface) snuggling with Azz. (Hacker-Kitty)
[personal profile] azurelunatic
I have a locational song for Yellface.

There's a kitten on the bed.
There's a kitten on the bed,
Please pet her silly head,
This kitten on the bed.

There's a kitten on the sill.
There's a kitten on the sill,
So please don't speak her ill,
This kitten on the sill.

There's a kitten on the couch.
There's a kitten on the couch,
She just might be a grouch,
This kitten on the couch.

A good grade

Jul. 20th, 2025 04:16 pm
azurelunatic: A glittery black pin badge with a blue holographic star in the middle. (blue star)
[personal profile] azurelunatic
One of the LED bulbs in the bathroom vanity developed a distracting (which is code for sensory nope) flicker. Since the porch fixture takes the same bulb, I proposed that the ailing bulb become a public nuisance rather than a private one.


One of my oncologists (I believe I have dubbed her Dr. Bitsblobs, the oncology gynecologist) is retiring soon. So she has been bidding her patients farewell. Apparently I am a "gold star" patient in terms of trying my best to comply with medical advice, and for self-advocacy. A good grade in cancer, something that is normal to want and possible to achieve.

vital functions

Jul. 20th, 2025 11:24 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Reading. ExpandWells, Lister, Tufte, Brosh, McMillan-Webster )

... I also technically started reading a little bit of Descartes, and more around Descartes, for the pain project -- but really not very much as yet.

Playing. A round of Hanabi with A & houseguest! We were playing with very different House Norms which led to some hilarious miscommunication, but A Good Time Was Had.

A good time was also had following the toddler around a playground, including some time On A Swing where we worked out How Legs Do. :)

Cooking. Several Questionable loaves of bread (mostly "too much liquid, ergo puddle"). Three more recipes from East, none of which were particularly interesting to us. (Piccalilli spiced rice; Sodha's variant on egg fried rice; a tempeh-and-pak-choi Situation.)

And Ribiselkuchen! I have been very very happily eating Appropriately Seasonal Ribiselkuchen.

Eating. A made us waffles for breakfast this morning. I had them with SLICED STRAWBERRIES and SLICED APRICOT and MAPLE SYRUP and also LEMON JUICE and VANILLA SUGAR and I was very happy about all of this.

Making & mending. It is Event Prep Week. There are so many potions.

Growing. ... I got some more supports in for my beans? I have just about managed to break even on the sugar snap peas this year (should NOT have eaten the handful I did...) and might yet manage to do a little better than that, with luck.

Squash starting to produce female flowers (yes I was late starting them). More soft fruit (which desperately needs processing; I will be sad if I wind up needing to just compost the jostaberries that have been sat in the fridge for ...a while, now). Many many tomatoes, none of which were actually ripe yet last time I actually made it to the plot...

Observing. Peacock butterfly at the plot! Tawny owl (audio only)! Bats (ditto)! The Teenage Magpie Persists!

Also a variety of awkward teenage waterfowl in Barking Park, along with a squirrel who was most unimpressed when our attempts to feed it mostly involved accidentally handing it an empty half-peanut-shell. It made it very clear (well before any of us had independently noticed The Issue) that it understood we were willing to feed it but that we were doing a terrible job at this and Should Try Harder. I was delighted.

althea_valara: Final Fantasy X's Yuna, dancing on the water during The Sending (Yuna)
[personal profile] althea_valara
Sunshine-Revival-Carnival-2.png

Challenge #6

Journaling prompt: What games do you play, if any? Are you a solo-gamer or do you view games as a social activity?
Creative prompt: Write a story/fic around the theme "game night".

Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.


I don't watch TV (except for game shows during dinner, and that's more mom's doing than mine). I don't watch movies. It's rare I read books these days. What I DO do, though, is play video games, mostly (Japanese) Role Playing Games. Those games are filled with stories, which satisfies my need for escapism into other worlds. I also find that I very much prefer my media to be interactive these days; when I do try to watch a movie, I often get antsy and bored because it's so passive.

Streamed Games



I'm currently playing three games on my Twitch Stream:

* Final Fantasy V for the Four Job Fiesta, Mondays at 7:30pm CDT
* Final Fantasy XI, where we're currently in the Chains of Promathia expansion, Fridays at 7:30pm CDT
* Final Fantasy XIV, doing side content, Saturdays at 7:30pm CDT

...uh, yeah, I LOVE FINAL FANTASY. I have played non-Final Fantasy games on stream - most recently was the Nintendo Switch game Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles which was chill and delightful. And I really hope to play more non-Final Fantasy games in the future.

Final Fantasy V is a single-player game, in which there are a multitude of jobs your four characters can play as. The Four Job Fiesta is a challenge in which you are assigned four jobs to play, one for each character, and you can only play as those jobs. It's usually a fun, grand time, but I have not had luck with the RNG this year; I've gotten terrible jobs that I don't enjoy playing as (so far: Thief, Mystic Knight, and Beastmaster). Yuck! But I intend to continue the run.

Both FFXI and FFXIV are MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games). FFXI has been around for over 20 years (!!!) and I used to play it heavily about 12 years ago. Back then, I played with other players, because it was the best way to progress. The game is much more solo-friendly now, and I'm playing through story on a new alt, so I've been soloing everything with Trusts (non-player characters).

FFXIV is most efficient when played with other players, and yet I do a lot of things solo in that game too. I'm pretty shy and have social anxiety, so it can be hard for me to find the courage to play with others. I'm getting better at doing that, though! I've been joining some Party Finders that sound fun and interesting, including a challenge run of an Alliance raid (we went all healers!) and a Blue Mage spell learning party.

I'm grateful there's so many different ways to advance in FFXIV, and I can do it in a way that's comfy for me. But yes, I do want to practice putting myself out there and being brave.

Casual Games



I play a number of casual games, too! These I can pick up and play for a few minutes here and there.

On my Fire tablet, I play Word Shaker (a Boggle clone) and Solitaire City where I am VERY partial to the Yukon solitaire game.

On my iPhone, I play WordScapes. My particular version sets of the board as a crossword.

On my computer, I'm playing Cats In Boxes which is a delightful puzzle game in which you direct cats to push boxes around so the boxes land on the shaded squares. I'm really enjoying it!

So yeah, I'm a BIG gamer. I enjoy casual games because they distract me from my thoughts and give me a few minutes to reset. I enjoy my (J)RPGs for the amazing stories and fantastic characters. I hope to be gaming the rest of my life!

some good things

Jul. 18th, 2025 11:41 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett
  1. Pilates. Managed to drag myself onto the mat, at gone 9.30 p.m., and wound up smiling to myself and the ceiling.
  2. COOL SHOWER. LOW ENOUGH HUMIDITY TO AIR-DRY.
  3. Listening to the bats as I type this up. (Less active than closer to dusk, but definitely still poking their heads out intermittently!)
  4. Local supermarket has resumed stocking an apple-and-pear juice, and I do in fact prefer it to the significantly more expensive stuff from the ridiculous fancy veg box people. HURRAH for Treats For Me.
  5. Played a round of Hanabi this evening. Enjoyed discovering a Clash Of House Styles, but nonetheless pleased with how we'd done. :)

(I have also made two extremely questionable loaves of bread -- the soda bread I managed to leave out half the flour, which meant it was... not quite inedibly salty, but... definitely Really Quite; the sourdough was just too high a hydration and Wanted To Be A Puddle -- and sent a couple of e-mails I was avoiding. And ordered a Small Treat.)

kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Beginning of last week: experimented with dropping my amitriptyline dose from 75 mg to 50 mg, after a week of having been really fairly good at actually taking it at or around 9 p.m. rather than... later... as an experiment in "does this reduce daytime sleepiness?"

(Prompted by the all-nighter I pulled filling out the EHRC consultation and trying to get the house to cool down overnight during the 35 °C weather: in service of same I did not take my amitriptyline and... felt weirdly good all the following day? With no naps? Like, not even sleep-dep euphoria, just... relatively cheerful and with it and so on and so forth?)

And, see, I'd been aware that last time I tried dropping the ami dose my insomnia got much worse again, so I was alert for that, but after the first night of Fretting I've actually been doing remarkably well! It is possible that I have more or less learned how to go to sleep! I'm super proud of myself!

... and then at the beginning of this week I started going "huh, I'm getting a bunch of endometriosis-y abdominal twinges. that's... interesting. like, it's about six months post-op, and that's when pain commonly recurs, but this doesn't feel like my pre-op pain at all, so what's... going on?"

WHAT IS GOING ON IS THAT I HAVE REDUCED THE DOSE OF MY ONE AND ONLY PAINKILLER.

But the really unfair bit, right, the bit I am actually aggrieved about?

... is that apparently last time I tried this my pain also kicked up a gear and I was also surprised then and I had completely forgotten about this. I remembered the insomnia!!! I did not remember the increased pain. How dare I produce evidence that Sometimes Painkillers Work. :|

althea_valara: Icon of Althea Valara, my main character from Final Fantasy XIV. (Althea Valara)
[personal profile] althea_valara
Sunshine-Revival-Carnival-2.png

Challenge #5

Journaling prompt: Be a carnival barker for your favorite movie, book, or show! Write a post that showcases the best your chosen title has to offer and entices passersby to check it out.
Creative prompt: Write a fic or original story about a character reluctantly doing something they are hesitant about.
Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.


(I am not going to write a fic, but I read the prompt and went OH, IT'S ME!!! I am very hesitant about the things I need to do these days, and pretty reluctant to actually do them. But I'm trying. By gods, I'm trying.)

Re: the journaling prompt: it doesn't include "your favorite game", HOW RUDE. But I am going to natter at you about Final Fantasy XIV anyway, because (a) most of my media consumption is through games these days, (b) I get to meme at you.

*takes a deep breath*

HAVE YOUR HEARD OF THE
CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED MMORPG
FINAL FANTASY XIV
WITH AN EXPANDED FREE TRIAL
WHICH YOU CAN PLAY THROUGH THE ENTIREY OF
A REALM REBORN
AND THE AWARD-WINNING
HEAVENSWARD
EXPANSION
AND ALSO THE AWARD-WINNING
STORMBLOOD
EXPANSION
UP TO LEVEL 70
FOR FREE
WITH NO RESTRICTIONS
ON PLAYTIME?

https://freetrial.finalfantasyxiv.com


Expanda bunch of reasons wny I love Final Fantasy XIV )

Things

Jul. 17th, 2025 11:36 pm
vass: Small turtle with green leaf in its mouth (Default)
[personal profile] vass
Books
Read Cliff Jerrison's short story 'Question 3', which is (as the author himself writes), "an ongoing mood".

Finished Freya Marske's A Power Unbound. Quoting my own reply to [personal profile] sovay in a comment on an earlier post, after finishing the trilogy: "it tries to do some interesting things with the nature of power and privilege, with reference to land ownership, aristocracy, cultural heritage, but I'm not sure how well it stuck the landing. I get the feeling the author was wrestling a bit with the politics of the system she'd set up, the implications of those politics, and the fact that she had to wrap up an Edwardian period fantasy romance trilogy with a happy ending."

The ending I got was fine for a romance novel, which is what this is. But I wanted more exploration of what the denouement really changed for everyone, and what I wanted would have been incompatible with that romance novel ending.

Started reading R.A. MacAvoy's The Lens of the World. I'm about 3% through and found it a lot rapier than I was expecting, although considering that it was published in 1990 I should have braced myself.

Comics
Tense about current events in Dumbing of Age and Questionable Content, for different reasons. Re QC, what I haven't seen mentioned yet in text is that the worst Anh's father can do to her is not simply cut off her allowance. [after the cut, spoilers and also psychiatric abuse triggers]

Expandmore )

Fandom
Beta-read the latest chapter of [archiveofourown.org profile] Drel_Murn's 'Wheel and turn'. First time I've betaed in a while.

Games
Unlocked Ascension 5 for all four Slay the Spire characters. The last of them was the Silent, tonight, with a lot of luck, Donu and Deca, and Corpse Explosion my belorpse explosion.

Tech
Finally got a secondhand laptop to replace the one which died. I've been spending a lot of time trying to get it in a condition in which I'll be comfortable using it.

Unfortunately, I made the decision that I'd try switching to Wayland, which necessitated exploring a lot of different utilities, and... yeah.

The most ridiculous shark I encountered, however, was not a Wayland problem but rather a font installation problem. In that when I installed font-awesome (a font package that is mainly symbols, often used for decorative purposes, e.g. pseudo-icons in one's status bar) none of the few fonts I had thus far installed had configured themselves as a default font family. font-awesome... did.

So all of a sudden my app launcher, my terminal windows, and some websites (including the Arch wiki) were displaying in font-awesome.

Some features font-awesome has:
- ligatures which convert the string "OSI" to the Open Source Initiative logo, "windows" to the Windows logo, and of course "at" to an @.

Some features font-awesome does not have:
- visible colons, virgules, or periods
Did I mention this was happening in my terminal?

The solution was just to install another font that considers itself a default font family (e.g. DejaVu) and clear the font cache. I managed to find a post by someone on Reddit who had the same problem, same font, same window manager, in a different operating system (Void.)

Links


Nature
Saw a red fox crossing the road last week.

some good things

Jul. 16th, 2025 10:49 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett
  1. Really enjoying the redcurrant cake I finally managed to make the other evening.
  2. First of the clothes-for-me from the latest Oxfam order showed up and is in fact more or less Perfect, hurrah. (Cargo shorts. Two pairs of linen cargo trousers due tomorrow...)
  3. Mulberries! [personal profile] ewt informed me that they were starting to come ready, so I took a detour via the local tree and did indeed manage to munch a token handful.
  4. I made a batch of mostly-white-some-rye caraway-and-poppyseed bread, and it goes spectacularly well with the cherry plum and vanilla jam a friend gave me at the weekend. I have been having some Very Happy Breakfasts.
  5. My extremely late-into-the-ground squash are starting to produce female flowers!
  6. And I found some more lurking long bamboo to install for the late-sown beans to maybe make their way up.
  7. AND I might actually break even on peas-for-sowing-next-year if the second flush on one of the plants does what it's threatening to, which I would be extremely excited about because I had been mildly regretting eating (instead of saving for seed) the handful we did eat, when my original intention had in fact been to Just Save Seed this year... (... but they were very tasty.)
  8. We are reading Hyperbole and a Half (the book) together a chapter at a time! They are an excellent short Shared Activity.
  9. I have this evening spent a pleasant ten minutes playing around with the dragons game and enjoying getting some very pretty possible dragons out of it. Yes good.
  10. Read about three elephants graduating to the Reintegration Unit run by the Sheldrick Trust and cried a lot. (Also at the accompanying video.) (Good crying.)
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Specifically I have tracked down a copy of Treatise on Man, which is probably the source of the claim I've seen phrased several ways, most eyebrow-raisingly and also most readily to hand by Steve Haines, attributing to Descartes the idea that pain is

something similar to hearing, it is a fixed signal and measurable response

and it turns out I've got access to a whole entire PDF which turns out to be only 71 pages, including quite a lot of fairly large images, so I suppose I'm going to read Descartes now as a break from working my way through the BBC's Higher revision guides on neurobiology, which is itself a detour from reading the introductory text on nerves aimed at undergraduates...

(The things I've actually been reading today consist of two chapters of Hyperbole and a Half, a partial chapter of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, both as Shared Activities with A, and about half of A Handful of Flour, a recipe book I have owned for quite a while now and am rapidly concluding I might no longer wish to dedicate shelf space to...)

vital functions

Jul. 13th, 2025 10:30 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Reading. This week I have mostly but not entirely been reading more murdery bot: Network Effect, Fugitive Telemetry, System Collapse, Rapport, aaaand I've also immediately launched myself into yet another quick reread of All Systems Red because we finished watching the TV series and therefore I want The Murderbot Of My Heart Thank You.

However! I have also continued reading about nerves! I have now read the entire first chapter of Nerve and Muscle, supplemented by a bunch more Wikipedia, and I think I am starting to have a better mental picture of how all of this works? I am going into way more depth than required by The Project, really, I think, but I will be happier if I know what's going on at least to the extent that I understand a little more about what it means, physically, when it is explained that some migraine preventives target Type A nerve fibre and others target Type C (which in turn is why if you get partial relief from something that targets Type C it's worth at least experimenting with adding in something targeting Type A).

And I have also made a tiny bit more progress with The Age of Seeds, but... yeah, mostly Murderbot.

Watching. Murderbot! I will concede that "I need to check the perimeter" did indeed get me Right In The Feels. I still prefer my book-Murderbot but I am beginning to acquire a better understanding of why folk love this Murderbot too.

The fanvid Bohemian Like You, by [archiveofourown.org profile] kuwdora, via [personal profile] sholio, via [personal profile] recessional.

Cooking. Several new things! Aubergine larb with sticky rice and shallot salad, lavender & honey Welsh cakes out of the Welsh cakes tourist tat mini-book, coconut pancakes. Now officially over two thirds of the way through East (with another Several planned for this week coming).

Eating. TODAY WE WENT ON AN ADVENTURE TO SEE ONE OF MY UNIVERSITY FRIENDS. I don't understand how it has been somewhere in the vicinity of ten years since I last got my act together to see this friend in particular given the part where, you know, we live in the same city, BUT we sorted ourselves out to meet up at King's Cross today and in addition to talking solidly for the entire duration we had FOOD including:

  • Ruby Violet (maxi moo moo with hazelnut crunch & raspberry, rosewater and prosecco on the grass by the canal; hazelnut & hazelnut brittle, salted caramel & almond brittle, hot cross bun, raspberry ripple, and coffee mocha ripple brought home, those last two primarily for A)
  • for lunch I had a funghi ma po tofu from rice guys, and A had a veg biriyani from somewhere I'm not immediately managing to spot on the Canopy Market trader list
  • from Bread Ahead we brought home two doughnuts -- pistachio crème brûlée for me, and something involving honeycomb for A; I think this is quite possibly the first custard doughnut I have ever eaten and actually liked (though were I to buy from them again I'd skip the pistachios)

... and upon meeting up with said friend, they reached into their bag with an "oh before I forget--" and pulled out a jar of jam, which conveniently gave me an excuse to reach into my bag and pull out the jar of jam I'd brought to give them, so I have swapped one blood orange + cardamom for one cherry plum + vanilla, and I've not eaten it yet but I am very excited about doing so.

... also raspberries, gooseberries, redcurrants, jostaberries...

Exploring. We poked around Granary Square a bit to go with Meeting Friends; we came home with lots of stickers (I also got some washi tape from that first one...), a gorgeous bowl (which she was not charging that much for at the market, goodness), and a business card for Creature Crafts by Nat so I could send their details on to Interested Parties.

Growing. ... I spent a whole day at the plot mostly reading Murderbot? (And did also do some weeding, and some harvesting, and some watering, and some general pootling.)