1. Scott Adams, having alerted the world that he had terminal cancer and not much longer to live, has died, according to an announcement released today. Adams was the creator of Dilbert, one of a short list of iconic newspaper comic strips that successively defined their eras. Dilbert was a startlingly satirical strip, a standing refutation of the notion that business, because it has to make a profit, is more efficiently run than government agencies. But like other strips, even iconic ones, it outlasted its own brilliance and became tired out and hectoring, but no more so than did Adams himself, who fell down the right-wing rathole, not just in supporting DT but by being disingenuously nasty about topics like racial identification and the Holocaust. The snark that once served him well had gone rancid.
2. Neil Gaiman. I don't have to elaborate on the grief that this once-esteemed author became revealed as a truly toxic sexual predator. But if you want an elaboration on his background, and on not the origins of his offenses but on how the seeds of what made him the kind of person who could do that could be found in even his most spectacular early successes, there is an astonishing book-length (over 70,000 words) online essay by Elizabeth Sandifer on Gaiman's career. It's full of digressions: it starts with a full explanation of the background of Scientology: Gaiman's father was a leading Scientologist, and it must have affected Gaiman, though it's not clear exactly how, and even once you get past that, there are plenty more digressions on the backgrounds of Tori Amos and others who appear in Gaiman's career. But the main thread is about his writings and his career as a writer. Sandifer's thesis is that Gaiman always wanted to be a celebrated big-name author, but unlike those who just dream of it, he worked hard to make his writings deserve that status, and there's much on his innovations and creativity. But there are also warnings, of which the echoes of the author in Ric Madoc of "Calliope" are only the most obvious. But then there was a turning point when Gaiman achieved that full celebrity status, around the time of American Gods and Coraline in 2001-2. It was then, Sandifer says, that the sexual abuse which had probably been going on long already became obsessive and even more toxic, and victims described the experience as if Gaiman were enacting a script. And, Sandifer says, his writing fell off and lost its savor at the same time: the cruelest literary remark in the essay is that The Graveyard Book "feels like the sort of thing a generative AI would come up with if asked to write a Neil Gaiman story."
If you want to see Emor at its best, visit its City Court in session.
Actually, if you are staying with an Emorian acquaintance, it's unlikely you'll be given any choice about this. Emorians assume that everyone in the world is as enthralled with their laws as they are. Thankfully, Emorians are right to be proud of their law system, founded centuries ago by their Chara and council. This law system, known simply as the Chara's law, is one of the bulwarks of civilization in the Three Lands.
The best way to visit a law court is to prepare yourself beforehand by listening to an Emorian explain their law system to you. Any Emorian will do; even Emorian ditch-diggers know a good deal about the law. Indeed, even Emorian women do.
The City Court is not terribly formal, by Emorian standards, and the rules for behavior will be explained to you beforehand by the guards at its door. Wear your best clothes and be on your best behavior; otherwise, you can relax and enjoy the spectacle.
On your way out, be sure to visit the adjoining Law Academy, founded by the City Court in order to give advanced lessons in the law. The Academy does not try to compete with the traditional Emorian methods of learning law: tutoring, apprenticeships, and playing law-based games when one is a boy. Rather, the Academy provides supplemental education for Emorians who plan to apply for high positions in the law, such as at the palace. Most of the Academy students are between the ages of eight and sixteen, though students as young as four are accepted, if they plan to apply for a youth post, such as scribing or paging. On the other end of the scale, a few students are full-grown men who, because of unfortunate circumstances, missed out on the normal training in the law that virtually all Emorian boys receive. In recent years, many of these students have been former slaves. The Academy welcomes them all, even going so far as to pay the fees of any students whose slave service left them penniless.
[Translator's note: Emorians' obsession with the law is on full display in Law Links.]
I have just been pleasantly surprised by a health insurance company: they aren't requiring "prior authorization" for my Kesimpta prescription. The person I spoke to this afternoon checked whether I had any of the drug left (no), and whether I'd missed a dose, before arranging delivery for Thursday morning. This is the drug whose copay will meet the 2026 out-of-pocket maximum. Yes, I selected a plan in large part based on the prescription drug coverage.
My counselor always starts with asking me how my week has been, since we last talked.
On every level, it has been A Lot.
But it was actually really good to talk about it all: on the macro level of course Minneapolis, my friends there and seeing fascism happen in places familiar to me, and then on the micro level angelofthenorth moving out, and just seeing her thriving after six months in our goofy lovely home.
I can't fix everything but I'm so glad to have the personal security needed to donate to mutual aid, to drag someone else out of a situation so similar to the one I needed saving from five years ago.
Our volunteers are from all over the world and have lots of different schedules so we can't always guarantee to have it at the same time each time. I know the last one was really late and that has made everyone (me included) nervous, but it is going up today within the next two hours. Thank you for reaching out. ❤️❤️
A bridge built across the Guadiana River by the Romans in the 1st Century AD now serves as a pedestrian connection across the river. It's seen everything from the Romans to the Visigoths to the Moors. Restoration work was done in the 7th century and the 17th century.
These days it's a quiet, though over 700m long, connection between the Alcazaba and the far side of the river.
I believe that mRNA vaccines are a real advance in the field, but there’s no doubt that we’re in the early days of their use. And given the complexities of the immune system, it’s not surprising that we haven’t worked out all the details - if you really want to get down to it, we don’t have all the details on any therapy involving the immune system at all. Which doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t use them! Let’s get even more real, and say that the same statement applies to small molecule drugs as well, whether they have an immune component or not. We can see the outcomes, we can measure risk/reward and safety/efficacy, and make informed decisions about when to use them and for what.
I’m beating on this point so hard, as I’m sure people will have realized, because of the violent hostility of the current US federal health authorities towards vaccination, which is generally given an extremely annoying won’t-someone-think-of-the-children spin about how gosh, we haven’t worked out all the details yet so why are we running cruel experiments on helpless pediatric patients, etc. This is how you can easily weaponize the “precautionary principle” into making sure that you take no actions at all because you can’t understand their full consequences down to the last detail (so you can’t be sure that nothing bad is happening and if you can’t be sure than how can you in good conscience and so on).
This new paper, for example, has more details about how mRNA formulations induce such useful immune responses. It’s already been noted that the lipid nanoparticles involves in packing the mRNA payloads have some inherent adjuvant activity, which is convenient. Non-native mRNA certainly has such activity, too, but in the vaccines the use of modified nucleosides turns down a lot of the innate immune system activity that would otherwise kick in. Almost all conventional vaccines have some sort of adjuvant to stimulate the immune system and make the antibody-eliciting effects more prominent (indeed, some of them would be almost useless without it at the dosages administered). I’ve written about adjuvants before, but there’s obviously a lot more to say about them because again, there’s a lot that we haven’t uncovered about their modes of action.
The LNP and mRNA components are both playing key roles in these vaccine effects, and I’m going to reproduce the graphical abstract of the paper to give you some idea of what’s going on. Well, perhaps. One thing it’s sure to do is make you glad that you’re not an immunologist, because I assure you that this is a very simplified picture as well. What you’re seeing are effects on dendritic cells (the “DC”) in the middle, and it turns out that both components of the vaccine are acting on these but through different pathways. To add to the fun, both involve CD4-bearing T cells and the associated T-follicular helper (Tfh) cells, but again through different pathways.
This research group has evidence that the nucleoside-modified mRNA used in the vaccines does not completely make them invisible to the innate immune system’s pattern-recognition-receptors that are always watching for foreign mRNA. Those are also why the mRNA constructs used in the vaccines need to be well purified to remove double-stranded species, which will really trip those receptors for you if present. It turns out that the purified, nucleoside-modified mRNAs do set off a Type I interferon response that had not been worked out before, and the authors propose that there must be a less-characterized pattern recognition receptor or perhaps a yet-undescribed mechanism of action for existing ones that causes this. They haven’t found either one yet, but their evidence strongly suggests that something like one of these has to be out there.
But the responses to both the lipid nanoparticles and the mRNA species are important here, and when things go correctly they actually reinforce each other. There are other experiments in the paper that show that the LNP response is a local one, almost entirely occurring in the nearly draining lymph node to the vaccine injection site, instead of a system-wide effect. It doesn’t even look as if you have to inject them at the same time or in any physically coupled formulation (as we do) - the effect works either way. But since we need the LNPs to protect the mRNA and to get good uptake into cells, it’s certainly good that they’re such mechanistic partners. This could well help to explain the failures of many other plausible mRNA delivery systems that were tried in the earlier years of such research.
The hope is that as we study these systems more closely we can work out how to hit this balance by design rather than by trying years of things that don’t work as well (or at all!) We’ve got a ways to go before we get to that point, but learning all the tiny switches and dials of the vaccine immune response is going to be a very worthwhile endeavor.
My anxiety sounds like metal scratching on glass and I am comfort-seeking so for the snowflake top ten, have ten things, mostly media, I turn to for comfort. ( Read more... )
2025 has been my most productive year for sometime! I posted ~37K of fanfic, 7 Final Fantasy and 2 Yuletide. I posted earlier about the FFVII fics I wrote for candyheartsex and seasonsofdrabbles, and I've done Yuletide, but here are the others:
I picked up a pinch hit for the Whump Exchange and then had it bounced by the mod for containing a recipient DNW, which was non con. What I thought I’d written was rough sex, which the recipient explicitly did want and I thought it was quite clear the characters did too, so I was a bit miffed and even more so when the mod reassigned the fic to someone else without first giving me the chance to fix mine but fine, I sent regrets and an apology to the mod in a mature adult fashion and then sulked for DAYS until it was less than 24 hours before author reveals, at which point I cut all the sex out and tweaked the fic to make it work as a recipient treat. I wanted to focus on Genesis’s degradation (this has a specific medical meaning in FFVII) and one particular image that got a hold of me, and it still works for that; Genesis and Sephiroth shoving each other against walls and being bitey will just have to wait for another time.
Ripping Myself Off (1317 words) by Cyphomandra Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Genesis Rhapsodos/Sephiroth Characters: Genesis Rhapsodos, Sephiroth (Compilation of FFVII) Additional Tags: Body Horror, Serious Injuries, Whump Summary:
Genesis and Sephiroth, after the incident in the training room.
My lingering irritation at this meant that when I then saw another pinch hit (for my Chocolate Box recipient) for a non con exchange I pounced on that just to prove I could write non con intentionally. I wrote 3.6K of yes totally definitely non con for the deadline and then added another 15K (!) before the collection opened because I felt bad for the characters and wanted to get them to a slightly better place, which does possibly indicate that I am still doing the challenge wrong. Back in the lab again with Zack and Cloud, and it was interesting because I went into the fic expecting Cloud to be the one to do all the suffering, but it’s actually Zack who ended up the most tormented. Despite that, it’s still more upbeat than canon. I am currently resisting the urge to add more (not least because I think Cloud is going to fall apart spectacularly a few more days after the fic ends).
Exposure Protocol (16852 words) by Cyphomandra Chapters: 5/5 Fandom: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth (Video Games 2020-2024) Rating: Explicit Warnings: Rape/Non-Con Relationships: Zack Fair/Cloud Strife Characters: Zack Fair, Cloud Strife, Hojo (Compilation of FFVII) Additional Tags: Warning: Hojo (Compilation of FFVII), Human Experimentation, Mad Scientists, Bad Guys Made Them Do It, Rape/Non-con Elements, Whump, nobody expects the seventh infantry, Love Interest Rapes Them to Prevent Something Worse, canon AU Summary:
“…rate of mako uptake and binding to DNA-linked receptors can be predicted via measurement of specific pharmacokinetic parameters (see table 1). In individuals with poor profiles (predicted uptake <5% of normal), toxicosis is common. Typically high dose oral has been used in this setting, but the failure rate remains unacceptably high. In this article I outline, with detailed case studies, three new methods of achieving effective levels without such shortcomings; rectal adminstration, externalisation of the large gut with mesenteric perfusion, and removal of at least 50% of dermis in conjunction with mako baths. Note is also made of the role of partially pre-metabolised mako sourced from high-mako individuals…”
from Overcoming mako toxicosis: a paradigm shift. Hojo et al. Research and Development, Shinra Electric Power Company.
[in submission]
In the 24 hours or so before the collection went live and before I did final edits, I wrote two drabble treats for the Summer Season of Drabbles, both FFVII again, one Cloud/Rufus and one Cid/Vincent; I can see where shippers for both pairings are coming from but I haven’t tried to write them before, so this was fun. I then almost had another DNW moment when I did a casual last minute check and found that one prompter DNW’d present tense, necessitating a rewrite of that treat - followed by total panic until I checked my non con recipient as I’d written the whole thing in present tense, but fortunately they only DNW’d sensible things like het.
Cid gets some assistance with the Bronco - and offers some in return.
(I then plodded slowly onwards with another Zakkura long fic, but although this is now pushing 10k the ending is still very far off and I could not get momentum. I signed up for wip big bang in the hope it would help, but noooo.)
Writing goals for next year: finish something that's not for an exchange. Try and match/exceed word count.
I looked through my browser history for the last seven days and these are the things I visited and find rec-worthy:
websites:
onelook dictionary - i love their thesaurus, it's wide enough that it really helps me find similar/related (not identical!) words when I'm stuck perplexity - ai chatbot with good source link functionality chinesefonts.org - a website where you can download good free Chinese (unicode) fonts boardgamearena - a site where you can play boardgames online (alone and with/against other players) - accounts are free
dw comms:
snowflake_challenge (duh), tv_talk (talk about the shows you watched), c_ent (talk about the cdramas you watched / make rec posts), thestoryinside (let someone choose a book from your to-read list for you), gamechangerhr (heated rivalry comm), cultivativity (cultivate your creativity)
Today I discovered that it is possible to add Too Many new games on Steam! It actually locked me out and I had to wait an hour before I could add the final items from the Humble Bundle I was working on. It did take fifty games in 25 minutes to hit the rate limit, though, which doesn't seem too unreasonable. I think I have now added every game I bought via Humble Bundle to my Steam account, which is a nice (small) milestone.
My cleaner came today for the first time since before Christmas, and my house is so pretty now! Also once she was gone I could start the laundry going again (I try to have all the laundry dry and away before she arrives, so she can e.g. vacuum the floor instead of having to work around the drying racks). I've hung three loads already, there's a hoodie in now and a second to go in when it's done, and the only things left that need washing are the half of the bedding that will need a drying rack. That will have to wait until the weekend. I would say "then I'll be all up to date!" but then I'll be at Mum's and will need to catch up again once I return from there! Still, I'm closer than I was.
There have been workpeople outside my window all day dismantling the next block of garages for replacement, which includes mine; I'm quite excited by this, since at the end of it I will hopefully have a garage with a door that I can open! and close! all by myself! without crowbars and ropes and enough equipment that I could really use three hands. Not that I have much to keep in it; the only thing in there before was my bike. Still, it would be nice to get that out of the spare room again.
Today I finally had sufficient time around lunchtime to try Cincinnati chili. I fixed it according to the article on "How to Eat Cincinnati Chili Like a Local" and then sat down to eat it. I didn't like the first bite. So I ate some more, hoping it would get better with further exposure. By the time I had eaten half of the serving, I gave up and decided I just didn't like it. So I disposed of it, brushed my teeth, then brushed my teeth again because I could still taste it in my mouth. I wish I liked it, because the concept sounded interesting, but I don't.
I think I might try eating "regular" chili on spaghetti, because it wasn't the "on spaghetti" part that I disliked, but in the meantime I'm over here eating peppermints one after another to try to clear the taste in my mouth. (I'm really not trying to be overly dramatic here. It's just very rare that I try something and don't like it, so I'm having trouble coping with it.)
The Marshall Britannia steam monument in Yogyakarta is a significant historical display located at the east entrance of the Yogyakarta Railway Station (also known as Stasiun Tugu).
It is not a traditional railway locomotive, but rather a Marshall single-cylinder portable steam engine, a type typically used for running equipment in the sugar industry. This model was built by Marshall Sons & Co. Ltd. between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries.
The monument is now located at the north wing of the Stasiun Tugu entrance, just across from the end of Jalan Malioboro, which is the iconic main street and heart of the largest tourist and commercial district in Yogyakarta.
The station also features a D301 22 hydraulic diesel locomotive monument at its south entrance, underscoring the history of rail transport in the area.
scrottie and I keep a list of House Projects on an envelope on a mini-clipboard* that usually lives on the dining room table.
One of the projects that has been on the list for a long time is the one highlighted by my pen, "Deal with potato rot cabinet damage." At one point, a bag of potatoes was forgotten on a kitchen cabinet shelf, and the rot seeped into the wood below. You can see the damage to the drawer on the left side of this photo, underneath this chair I reglued:
It occurred to me that if I was doing a lot of oar sanding, it might not be much of a stretch to also sand down this drawer and see about refinishing it. So I did.
I should note, this cabinet came with the house, so it's on us to ensure it looks fine when we move out. But I'm not inclined to try and restore it to exactly its original condition. Instead I figured I should use one of the cans of wood stain we have lying around to make it look better, then put some fresh coats of finish on top of that.
I ultimately settled on this whitish stain/finish:
After some coats of this and some coats of that, it's done.
As you can see in this photo, George approves, and also, we now keep our potatoes in a bowl.
So that project went well, all things considered.
The project that went sideways is one I don't have a ton of photos for at the moment. I'd been hoping to make it a gift for S when he gets back into town, but now I'm having my doubts. It is the project of fabricating steel backing plates for some oarlock sockets for the O'Day Javelin daysailer. I was pretty pleased with how things went with cutting a small steel plate into smaller pieces for each plate. Drilling holes has been a different story. I brought the steel pieces into the lab to drill holes with the lab drill press:
So far, so good. Then I went to enlarge the center hole, and ultimately learned about what happens when stainless steel overheats, which is to say, it hardens and starts to destroy drill bits.
Sigh.
Further internet searches have suggested to me that maybe the lab drill press wasn't the best choice, after all; the relatively high rotational speed of the drill press can contribute to overheating problems. So now I've packed things back up to bring them home again. I might just ask S to finish this particular project out. The better news is that I made 3 potential plates, so there's still more material to work with.
*When it's up to me, the envelope and its friends are clipped onto the clipboard. S prefers a looser approach.
This is the 2025 Mooglycal blanket. I was still attempting to use up the stash which, it transpired, had mostly orange and purple wool in it - not the most auspicious combination but there is now at least a lot less of it than there was and all that really bright orange has gone. The general concept was vertical stripes of red/orange and purple/pink with the darker colours at the top and lighter colours at the bottom. It didn't really work, in part because there was just so much of some colours. Anyway, I have decided to actually have a colour scheme next year since the stash is now under control (well at least that bit of the stash that involves the wool I use for making these blankets).
Jodi McAlister, An Academic Affair: A Novel (2026): two scholars in Sydney who've been competing since they were undergrads inhabit enemies-to-lovers without doing it, become housemates, and then inhabit sham-marriage (obviously, they're aware of the relevant topoi---he's an early modernist, she does pop fiction) because a job and a family hang in the balance. The Goodreads detail page has a more spoilery summary.
It's a relief to find that I haven't become a fan of romances, only better able to grasp them. This one is fine, like, whatever---but as academic novels go, it's almost alarmingly solid despite the brisk, casual tone. It's not satire when the caricatures resemble people one's met, people one's friends have worked with. Though one could say the same of Lodge (whose character-bases lasted long enough for me to've met a few, glancingly) and perhaps of Smiley and Tartt, Lodge wanted things to seem flash to the uninitiated while he took apart what suited him; all three writers sought to construct various levels of mystique. McAlister knows the world I was in for some years, despite being the other side of it geographically, and her narrative defines "precariat" for the uninitiated.
(Lodge: Changing Places et seqq. Smiley: Moo. Tartt: The Secret History, which I DNFed.)
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snowflake_challenge
The LNP and mRNA components are both playing key roles in these vaccine effects, and I’m going to reproduce the graphical abstract of the paper to give you some idea of what’s going on. Well, perhaps. One thing it’s sure to do is make you glad that you’re not an immunologist, because I assure you that this is a very simplified picture as well. What you’re seeing are effects on dendritic cells (the “DC”) in the middle, and it turns out that both components of the vaccine are acting on these but through different pathways. To add to the fun, both involve CD4-bearing T cells and the associated T-follicular helper (Tfh) cells, but again through different pathways. 
