chess | Reading

I had so much work to do today, and yet an hour after I started I still hadn't managed to log in to my computer.

I had to change my password yesterday (yay security theater! thanks I hate it!). Today I could log in on my phone but not my laptop. I carefully typed my password so many times. Always the same response. I even went through the inaccessible process to change the password AGAIN so then had to remember the new new one and not mix it up with the old new one all these times I typed it... (I even tried the old old one a few times, just in case.)

I felt like I was coming unglued from reality.

I had to call IT.

I hate my workplace IT. I hate it so much I just lived with a fairly significant problem (not being able to access some documents I need), for years, after repeated attempts at getting them to fix this problem that ended with them not even listening to it or understanding it. As soon as they heard a word that meant it could be someone else's fault they switched off, and no amount of me explaining that there wasn't anything anyone else could do and it started when they made me use an authenticator app which I get is more secure than SMS but also didn't fucking have the settings I needed... I just gave up trying and do without access to those things.

So for me to call them is really dire straits. But I have a ton of work to do and it has to be done today! So I called.

The guy I got told me to do a thing that I said I couldn't when I couldn't even log in. He barely let me finish talking before he said, "Totally incorrect."

I don't know if you've ever offered a simple problem -- like "how can I do anything on the computer if I can't log in?" --only to be met with "Totally incorrect" as a reply but lemme tell you, it has a really physical effect!

I could hardly hear what he was saying after that because I was doing that wheezing, disbelieving laugh that I associate with Michael Hobbes being on a podcast where he's just been told something that a fascist has said. I was actually speechless. It actually knocked the breath right out of me.

People just...should not talk to each other like that!

I just hung up on him.

In the process of treating me like a Victorian schoolboy who was about to get beaten for making a mistake in his Latin, he'd inadvertently reminded me of something that would actually help me address the problem, so I hung up and did that.

But at 10:30 this morning I still hadn't gotten any work done because I had to log back into everything on my phone since I'd changed the password again, and process all the emotions I've been through before I'd even had a chance to make tea... It took most of the morning to do that, make breakfast and settle down to my task. I didn't manage to empty the dishwasher or give Mr. Smith his meds or get my laundry out of the dryer or anything else I might do in a day. I barely managed lunch.

But! I sent off the much-awaited long-overdue first draft to my boss and his boss, the next stage, at 16:44 today. Is it a good first draft? No! Is it done, 16 minutes before the end of the last possible work day I said it'd be done for after pushing the deadline twice? Yes!

BOOK DESCRIPTION???

Cillian Ryan is stagnating. He’s staring down the wrong end of his 30s aggressively single, his unexciting job is underpaid, and he’s facing the prospect that his codependent best friend might genuinely have found herself a viable girlfriend this time. Which will leave him with no company for his evenings in front of the TV whatsoever.

Things only become more complicated when he encounters his dream man, who is equally lonely, charming, funny, hot, and married. Not only married, but married to someone too anxious to let him out of the house for long enough to make friends.

He has absolutely no intention of getting involved with a married man; no intentions of seeing his best friend’s new romance collapse like a dry sandcastle; and definitely no intention of kidnapping a cat in from not-quite-certain doom, but intentions and outcomes don’t always line up in his life…

CLEMENTINE (114,000 words) is a contemporary LGBTQ romance set in Oxford and Margate, and foregrounding queer friendships. It will appeal to fans of [??????]

I never got around to talking about the other two things that D and I saw that week, Breaking the Code or Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein.

Breaking the Code is a play that D had seen a TV movie version of (starring Derek Jacobi, that sounds amazing) of a book he's also read and considers the best biography of Alan Turing. D knows quite a lot more about Turing than I do, so I consider this high praise. My knowledge is more on the did-the-walking-tour that that guy (Ed something?) does around "Turing's Manchester," I've seen his mug chained to the radiator at Bletchley Park and for the afternoon I was there I did understand how the bombe worked but I've forgotten again now...and of course I know the tragic ending to his story that queers absorb: prosecution, chemical castration, suicide. I was really enjoying the walking tour until I remembered that bit was coming up at the end...

Anyway, I really enjoyed the play. I liked the epilogue that has been added to it, where a modern-day pupil at the school Turing went to is doing a presentation or something about him for LGBT History Month, which adds his pardon and a little more context to what's otherwise an utterly pointless loss of life. This life also happened to be really important to the second world war, but I am always mindful of how many ordinary lives were diminished in similar ways. I do think that having to be secretive about what he did during the war, even afterward, does offer a sad parallel to his isolation.

The play is set during his time in Manchester, with flashbacks to school and Bletchley and everything and I've no idea how true to life this is but in the play anyway he's wistful about his time at Bletchley, seeing it as a period of freedom, getting to be himself -- he's played with a very autistic affect and a stammer that can be severe, he could be weird and queer and chain his mug to the radiator and he could get away with whatever he wanted because his brain was so important to the war effort.

"Breaking the code" at first seemed an odd name for the play because breaking the code is exactly what -- D taught me -- Turing did not do; three Polish cryptologists did. (Turing developed optimizations to their methods, and created an electromechanical computer which allowed Enigma to be brute-forced much faster. He was a genius and deserves to be recognised as such. But he was part of a team at Bletchley who were building on Polish work, and Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski deserve recognition along with the French spy Hans-Thilo Schmidt and many others.) But of course the phrase can also of course to social codes, which included compulsory heterosexuality. When Turing reports a burglary to the police and in the process tells them he has broken the law -- "gross indecency" -- they have to act on that; he has broken a part of the legal code.

The other metric that D judges a biography of Alan Turing on is whether it says he invented the computer -- he didn't, or if he did it depends on what you mean by "computer" and for that matter "invent" -- and the play could probably have done better at that but it didn't feel egregiously inaccurate either. Turing does at one point say something like "we won the war because of me," but of course saying it doesn't make it so, and he says it to his "bit of rough picked up from the Oxford Road" as the police officer describes the young man, so the possibility of exaggeration to impress (or dismiss?) seems plausible.

Finally in a thing that probably only I noticed, near the end of the play when Turing has met up with an old Bletchley friend, who's now a wife and mother, and he's now infamous for his gay crime. So they have a lot to catch up on. At one point Turing is explaining about his "chemical castration," which was the option he took to avoid prison. I'd known about this, but I'd somehow never until this moment considered that what he'd been given was of course estrogen. They gave him dysphoria, I thought. What an awful thing to do to anybody. Anyway, the thing I noticed is that when Turing tells his friend in his matter-of-fact tone "I'm growing breasts!" all around the auditorium there was a chuckle from the white, older audience who like D and I were spending our Halloween at t the theater. I didn't laugh. Turing cheerfully went on to say something like "No one knows what'll happen to them when I stop getting the injections, if they'll go away or what!" Sitting there, seventy-one years later and a short walk from the stop where we'd gotten off the bus, which I just learned is where he met his "bit of rough from the Oxford Road" as the police officer in the play describes his lover, and a chest flattened with modern compression fabric, I winced. No. If only they just went away again... I was disappointed but not surprised at the room full of respectable theatergoers laughing at this. (The idea that taking estrogen would make someone less horny seemed much more amusing to me, but that's based on knowing so many trans women, and they are of course women and not men who are being punished.)

Oh wait, one other me-specific thing: in the play, Turing's mother did not accept that her son had died by suicide. It reminded me of my own mom, who was outraged when asked by police if my brother might have crashed his car intentionally. I understood that they have to ask but she was livid at the question. Maybe some mothers are just always going to be. You think you know your son so well, maybe better than anyone else, and then it turns out that no one gets to know him any more. I saw this play the day when I'd had that dream about being called my brother's brother so maybe that's why I thought of this.

Bless the bus driver who is not making me pay £2 for a bus that leaves at 9:29 when my disabled pass means I get free bus travel from 9:30. (I don't have to pay at home but I'm outside Greater Manchester for once, and it works within England but only at the statutory minimum times, between 9:30am and 11pm).

The driver said "I set off in one minute so in two minutes you can tap your pass." So I went and sat down and he said "alright mate, scan your pass now!" and I got up from my seat to trot back to the front of the bus and do it.

Between these two events, someone on the bus sneezed (yet more reason to be glad I wear a mask on public transport!), and someone else further back the bus shouted "bless you!" People are so nice here (I'm in Chester).

Though I did feel a bit out of place for thanking the driver, which is pretty normal here but no one else getting off the bus did there. And it was an unusually heartfelt thanks too, he really had helped me out!

I've written quite a few tightly friends locked posts about personal things that have been going on in my life recently. It's got me thinking a bit about societal expectations and how difficult they are when you don't fit in the normal boxes. It somehow feels like this is something that needs to be expressed more publicly.

To give some background without going into too much detail, my ex-wife has health conditions which impact on her daily living and mobility, we also have a young son. When he was a toddler, I repeatedly needed to take emergency leave to look after them both, so it quickly became apparent that full time work wasn't a sustainable option.

I got a good degree from a good university and always had it drilled into me that I was a high flier that could have a good well paid career. OK, I didn't always choose the most well paid career path, but I earned enough to pay my way. Of all the decisions I've made so far in my life, the one to give that up and rely on benefits for our financial needs was one of the hardest. I think part of the difficulty is knowing that people were expecting me to be in a far better position than this at this stage of my life and knowing I've not met those expectations by a long way. I spent years avoiding answering phone calls from the area code of the University in case it was there fundraising calls as the conversations were so awkward (I've since been able to opt-out). Yet somehow, it's portrayed in society as a life choice taken by the lazy to live comfortably without working for it. I certainly don't feel lazy or particularly comfortably off financially (far from it), but somehow have to live with that stigma all the same.

I always imagined being a fairly hands-on Dad to my son, but it's become much more than that with me taking on most of the parenting. It some ways it's the best decision I've ever made as it's given me a far closer bond with my son than I could have ever imagined. However, it often feels in public that however much I'm doing the visible stuff like the school run people assume his mum's doing most of the parenting behind the scenes because of the traditional gender roles.

I've had other parents give me messages for his mum rather than talking directly to me. I was discussing with one of the other mum's from his school recently and mentioned that I was applying to change the child benefit to my name and was shocked when they were completely surprised that he'd be with me most of the time post separation.

I suppose I'm guilty of it myself to an extent as I was quite surprised when social services gave me the label of his "primary caregiver" even though I knew that's what I did. In some ways it's quite nice that people don't assume his mum can't do it due to her disability, but the opposite assumption does make me feel a little invisible.

Current Mood: thoughtful

This too is a war story, though not of the world wars. It is not a tragedy. But it is something.

My grandfather Juan Diego served in the Spanish Legion, and survived the tragic farce of Melilla. He was minor nobility they say, son of a count or something but my lack of the language stops me from properly chasing that back. Certainly he was of extremely good family, and rather gorgeous.

His family connected to Santa Casilda (no, really!) which would place them back in Toledo I guess. I have no idea about this. Here is Saint Casilda though, looking properly intense.

Before or after his time in the Spanish Legion, Grandfather Juan Diego came home and was a wit. He drew cartoons or wrote columns for a newspaper, and was best described as an armchair socialist - quite a vocal one at that. However, when a communist mayor was elected, he was equally as loud in his scorn because the man could not read or write, and Grandfather thought it was ridiculous for someone illiterate to hold such a role.

Chickens do come home to roost. Came the Spanish Civil War, and came too, the time when the communist mayor decided to settle old scores. My grandmother was pregnant with my mother at the time, and all Juan Diego's family and friends tried to persuade him to leave the house via a laundry basket hung out of a window while the mayor's chums gathered outside. He refused, and strode out, thoroughly drunk, to meet the mob. They were going to shoot him then and there, but a canny friend of his persuaded them not to do so on account of my grandfather being a doctor, a much needed necessity at that time. It was mostly a lie. Grandfather had studied the equivalent of a PhD, but it had nothing to do with medical practice, and in any case he never finished it. Nonetheless, the persuasion worked, and he was dragged off to prison. Then the mayor had a little table set up with wine, glasses, and chairs, even a tablecloth across it, and bade my grandmother sit down and drink. Then in front of her, they burned the house down.

She never got over it. To her days ends her eyes would turn dark with tears and she would rock backwards and forwards. She loathed communists ever after.

I do not know how the family lived then, but when the nationalists came, they drove the communists out and set my father free... until they saw his track record of espousing liberal thought in his journalistic career. Then, only his past as an officer and a gentleman saved him from execution, and back to prison he went. This time the family were left alone, but when he was released he had no teeth.

He never spoke of the war again.

From then on, for a long time the family had guards at the door, my mother remembered playing with their capes and running around them, completely at ease. Maybe they were there to stop crazy commies coming back and doing harm. Or perhaps there was another reason.

But one day the guards at the door went away and didn't come back. He lived, they lived, and they all grew old and happy. Such a contrast to Grand Uncle John's short days, and yet he and Grandfather Juan Diego are not without connection. There's heroism in dying bravely, heroism in living bravely too.

To any who have read this far, I hope your life and the lives of your folk remain free from war and all its cruelty. I hope that peace, not the milky word on cards, but the feeling and reality of it, fill our days. Here's to that.

This entry from January 2022 belongs here on Armistice Day.

https://smokingboot.dreamwidth.org/935077.html

Rest in peace Grand-Uncle John.

Assignments are OUT! Initial Pinch Hits are INall claimed!

Pinch hits are claimed on a first-come-first-serve basis. You do not have to be signed up for the exchange to claim a pinch hit.

To claim: comment on this post (comments are screened) OR send us an email at tlt.fic.exchange@gmail.com. In both cases, please include your AO3 username AND include the username and/or Pinch Hit number (i.e. PH 69) of the request you're claiming.

This pinch hit is due with the rest of the assignments on December 27, 2025 at 11:59pm PST.

PH 1 - mediocrebones

Request 1
Rating: Explicit
Medium: Fic
Relationships: Group: Pyrrha Dve & Camilla Hect & Nona & Dulcinea Septimus & Palamedes Sextus; Group: Pyrrha Dve/Palamedes Sextus/Dulcinea Septimus
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting; Explicit Sexual Content; Polyamory;Relationship Study; Transfeminine Palamedes Sextus

Link to full request

PH 2 - Ravioli_Gone_Rogue

Request 1
Rating: Teen and Up Audiences
Medium: Fic
Relationships: Group: Harrowhark Nonagesimus/Gideon Nav
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - College/University; Angst with a Happy Ending; Fluff

Link to full request

Watch on YouTube

(added a very short video demonstrating Bad Weaving)

floor loom weaving WIP

The weft yarn is my two-ply handspun on an Ashford Traveller: wallaby-merino-cashmere-silk blend from Ixchel.

...warping is indeed 99.99% of the physical work, moreso than with a pin loom or rigid heddle loom! After that, the physical work of weaving (plainweave) is stupidly easy.

Joe is getting the world's jankiest tiny blanket out of this. :) One has to start somewhere!

1. How the world's richest man is boosting the British right: (tags:politics fascism ElonMusk twitter bias )
2. James Watson: From DNA pioneer to untouchable pariah: (tags:biography DNA history viaPatrickHadfield )
3. Fact-Checking Claims About Zohran Mamdani: (tags:politics usa satire funny )
4. Reminder that the New York Times regularly prints hateful nonsense (an article about someone they tried to interview about Zohran Mamdani): (tags:politics newyork journalism OhForFucksSake USA viaKenny )
5. A bunch of engineers built a drifting wheelchair for an injured coworker. It looks awesome.: (tags:disability engineering video )
6. The nature of the last universal common ancestor and its impact on the early Earth system: (tags:biology genetics earth )
7. Meet the teen behind the Louvre 'Fedora Man' mystery photo: (tags:france police photos crime Paris style )
8. New flu virus mutation could see 'worst season in a decade' (get your vaccinations!): (tags:flu doom )
9. Long-term Melatonin use associated with much higher risk of heart problems and death: (tags:medicine heart )
10. Senate Democrats Just Made a Huge Mistake: (tags:usa politics )
11. Scotland's first commercial windfarm will be able to deliver five times more clean power than before after being upgraded: (tags:scotland windpower GoodNews )

I need my upper wisdom teeth removed because of cavities and issues with adjacent teeth. For any of you with experience in getting wisdom teeth extracted as an adult, would you recommend full, partial, or no sedation during the procedure? Even if there's no pain, I'm worried the sensations will bother me. I don't really want to be unconscious, and not able to recall what happened. But it would be easier, I suppose. I just don't know.

I still haven't had time yet to schedule a consult with an oral surgeon, so I don't know what they will recommend. I should probably have taken that appointment for late November when I had the chance.

.

I lost weight due to the tooth problems I've had since August.
After Halloween, I came down with a stomach bug which didn't help.
I now weigh less than even I think I should. I'm trying to eat more to make up for it. Eating more is a chore; it isn't fun. I should find some big vegan pizzas to order rather than trying to fill up on cookies.

My face has changed. My cheekbones look and feel more pronounced.
The small depressions on the sides of my face, above the cheekbones and behind the eyebrow ridges, are also more pronounced. It low-level freaks me out every time I touch the sides of my face and feel the changes.

It is called "temple hollowing" and apparently also a normal part of aging. Searching on that term returns plastic surgery websites offering filler injections.

The antibiotics I had to take after the root canal (or the stress?) caused tiny pimples along the edges of my face, which still haven't cleared up. They're not visible but I feel them too.

That was odd.

Three of our four cats always yowled. Surya was too much of a lady for that kind of behaviour. Mismatch does it when she is facing the danger of not getting her own way. She and her sister Dervish - who now does it for no reason whatsoever - learned their loud habits from Ralik who did it first as a signal for attention and then as one of distress in his old age.

This morning, I fed the two girls, Mismatch in the kitchen, Dervish in the hall. Put the food down, left them munching, and set up some saucers of catmilk. I suddenly heard howling upstairs, not good as it meant Dervish hadn't eaten, and her breakfast contains her medication. I went to the hall to take the food upstairs and try to persuade her. She was right there where I left her, still scoffing silently away.

But I heard a cat upstairs.

Checked, no strays in the place. I'll talk myself out of it later with possibilities about acoustics and the fact the fact that I do sometimes get waking dreams, though I don't recall ever having one during conscious activity. But for now, I'm not going to doubt myself. That was a howling cat upstairs and I was awake and I heard it.

Time for coffee.

Joe helped and Cloud "helped." :)

warped floor loom

I'm waiting for my intended handspun weft yarn to finish drying in the sun outside before setting up my shuttle. :)

1. Women are three times more likely than men to get severe long COVID: (tags:women Pandemic )
2. We've found a biomarker for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: (tags:babies death )
3. Chinese Authorities Shut Down Film Festival in New York (By harrassing filmmakers and their families): (tags:china censorship movies usa OhForFucksSake )
4. The modern homes hidden inside ancient ruins: (tags:architecture history )
5. What do voters think would count as Labour breaking their promises on tax?: (tags:tax labour polls politics uk )
6. A Gene Editing Therapy Cut Cholesterol Levels by Half (trial only lasted 60 days): (tags:genetics health )
7. Interactive Time-Lapse Map Shows How the U.S. Took More Than 1.5 Billion Acres From Native Americans: (tags:history USA maps visualisation )
8. Why didn't Democrats codify Roe v. Wade when Obama had a fillibuster proof majority in 2009?: (tags:abortion politics USA )

I put a poem up every year around now. Doesn't matter to me if this is a mawkish habit, I do it. I choose a poem that reaches me in the moment of remembrance. This year the poem is Cha Till Maccruimein (Departure of the 4th Camerons) by Ewart Alan Mackintosh (1893-1917)
https://smokingboot.substack.com/p/lest-we-forget

I put it on my still-don't-know-what-I-am-doing-with-it substack, which works if you want to hear me recite it, but my feeling is that one's own voice works best for this. I have read Cha Till Maccruimein many times, but for some reason right now it makes me shudder and grow cold.

May war never touch you. May you and your folk ever come home.

Cha Till Maccruimein*
(Departure of the 4th Camerons)

The pipes in the streets were playing bravely,
The marching lads went by
With merry hearts and voices singing
My friends marched out to die;
But I was hearing a lonely pibroch
Out of an older war,
Farewell, farewell, farewell, MacCrimmon,
MacCrimmon comes no more.'

And every lad in his heart was dreaming
Of honour and wealth to come,
And honour and noble pride were calling
To the tune of the pipes and drum;
But I was hearing a woman singing
On dark Dunvegan shore,
In battle or peace, with wealth or honour,
MacCrimmon comes no more.'

And there in front of the men were marching
With feet that made no mark,
The grey old ghosts of the ancient fighters
Come back again from the dark;
And in front of them all MacCrimmon piping
A weary tune and sore,
On gathering day, for ever and ever,
MacCrimmon comes no more.'

Ewart Alan Mackintosh (1893-1917)

YES YES YES.

SciShow did a collab with Tom Lum and ESOTERICA and delivered a deep dive into the history of the relationship of chemistry and alchemy and the politicization of the distinction between the two: "In Defense of Alchemy" (2025 Oct 17).

I cannot tell you how much I loved this and what a happy surprise this was. It ties into a whole bunch of other things I passionately want to tell you about that have to do with epistemology, science, and politics (and early music) but I didn't expect to be able to tie chemistry/alchemy in to it because I had neither the chops nor the time to do so. But now, some one else has done this valuable work and tied it all up with a bow for me. I'm thrilled.

Please enjoy: 45 transfiguring minutes about the history of alchemy and chemistry and what you were probably told about it and how it is wrong.

Watch on YouTube

I have been dealing with some health stuff. I recently got a somewhat heavy medical diagnosis. It's nothing life-threatening, and of yet I have only had the mildest of symptoms, and seem to be responding well to treatment, but it's a bummer. My new specialist seems to be fantastic, so that's good.

Meanwhile, I have also finally started having a medical problem I've been anticipating ever since my back went wonky three years ago: my wrists have finally started crapping out. Because I cannot tolerate sitting for long, I have been using my laptop on a rig that holds it over me on my bed. But this means I haven't been using my ergonomic keyboard because it's not compatible with this rig. I'm honestly surprised it's taken this long for my wrists to burst into flames again, but HTML and other coding has always been harder on my arms than simple text, and the research and writing I've been doing on Latin American geopolitics has been a lot of that. And while I can use dictation for text*, it's useless for HTML or anything that involves a lot of cut-and-paste. Consequently, I've gotten really behind on all my writing, both here and my clinical notes.

So I ordered a NocFree split wireless keyboard in hopes that it will be gentler on my arms. It arrived last night, and I have been relearning how to touch type, only with my arms at my side and absolutely not being able to see the keyboard.

You would not believe how long it took me to type this, but it's all slowly coming back. Also, I feel the need to share: I'm doing this in emacs. Which feels like a bit of a high wire act, because errors involving meta keys could, I dunno, reformat my hard drive or crash the electrical grid.

Here's hoping I get the hang of this before I break the backspace key from overuse or accidentally launch a preemptive nuclear strike on Russia.

* If, you know, I don't too dearly value my sanity.

Profile

Michelle Taylor

January 2025

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Page Summary

cosmolinguist - Never was a story of more woe...
apiphile - unfortunately now i need comparable titles. i might kill myself instead.
andrewducker - Interesting Links for 12-11-2025
cosmolinguist - Breaking the Codes
cosmolinguist - Thank you driver
hmmm_tea - The Weight of Expectations: Stigma, Stereotypes, and Fatherhood
andrewducker - Interesting Links for 11-11-2025
smokingboot - Remembering Grandfather Juan Diego Romero Martin
smokingboot - Remembering Grand-Uncle John
themorikelife in tltfandomexchange - Initial Pinch Hits!
yhlee - creating a VERY SPENDY hammock for my catten
yhlee - weaving underway!
andrewducker - Interesting Links for 10-11-2025
darkoshi - teeth and bones; gauntness
smokingboot - 7.28
yhlee - Saori WX60 floor loom: warped!
andrewducker - Interesting Links for 09-11-2025
smokingboot - Lest We Forget
siderea - In Defense of Alchemy [sci/chem, hist]
siderea - Update, Or: J? Where the hell is the j? [me, heath]

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