17dec2025

Carol of the Bells is my favourite xmas song, which, given that it was evidently originally a New Year's harbinger of spring (and why yes, I think the year ought to start with spring, just like those ancient pagans) and not actually a xmas song at all, seems entirely appropriate.

I knew it hailed from Ukraine, and was under the impression that original melody was thousands of years old, but wasn't aware of its more modern history...I found all the AI video clips in the video a tad on the disconcerting side, but surely Ukraine's culture—for which Carol was an ambassador a hundred years ago when a choir toured worldwide to celebrate the country's newfound independence from the USSR—deserves recognition just as much now, as the country once again battles for its independence (from Russia. Sigh. The more things change, the more they stay the same....)

On a slightly brighter note (ha!) the splendidly ebullient Anna Lapwood gives a tour of her signature instrument, the organ explaining that playing it involves setting up a lot of sequences, akin to subroutines in a computer. Also that organs just sometimes randomly play notes. Oh, and she explains the meaning of ‘pulling out all the stops’:)

This giftwrap certainly doesn't do that, but it's pretty enough. Enjoy;)

16dec2025

Today, I'm doing difficult linkies...

I've recently read two re-interpretations of the classic horror tale The Fall of the House of Usher: Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothick and T Kingfisher's What Moves the Dead. For the record I found the former more horrifying and the latter more to my taste, mostly because Moreno-Garcia's heroine is everything I'm not, and though I admired the character, I didn't especially like her, and one of my failings as a reader is that I want to identify with the protagonists.

Both books are very good(1), and I recommend them highly if atmospheric horror is your thing (for someone who doesn't like horror I sure seem to consume a lot of it...) or you enjoy seeing modern interrogations of older stories. Neither of these books, however, came close to the horror I experienced while listening to one of Rebecca Watson's recent youtube videos, this one on the Freebirth movement. This appalling approach could be considered a subset of homebirth, which is why it made me so angry and sickened.

Homebirth, with a trained and experienced lay midwife, as I practised it, is for those for whom it is appropriate is a safe alternative to hospital birth—safer, in fact, if you've a particular horror of caesareans, as I did; freebirth, particularly as practised by the Free Birth Society, promotes wild pregnancy, meaning pregnancy without any prenatal care. (The irony being that in the wild, animals themselves may midwife; elephants are one such example. And other animals, on average, give birth more easily than we do.)

Roundabout the 16:30 mark, Watson observes what makes this dangerous approach so appealing:

...make women want to look outside of the medical establishment. Why am I paying through the nose for treatment that is so bad that I might end up getting a major surgery that I don't want or need or so bad that I might end up feeling so violated and destroyed that I need therapy and never want a doctor to touch me again? That's the loss of agency that a good con artist recognizes. The gap where they can slide in and make some coin whether they believe what they're selling or not.

Practically the first expectation a competent midwife will set up is that there are no perfect births, even more so than a doctor, because the less than 1% of people (in the US; homebirth is far more common in, ahem, more advanced countries) who pursue homebirth want to be in charge, and have what they hope is their idea of a great outcome: of course you plan and prepare, but reality has a way of upsetting those hopes; whereas the freebirth movement seems to be actively selling the idea of beautiful, complication free experience.

That's a lovely dream, but birth can have significant risks, and though the rather mundane ‘failure to progress’ is (I understand) much more likely than the blood-and-gore drama of placenta praevia or pre-eclampsia, nevertheless, it's not a condition for someone untrained to do on their own—I was in labor for over 10 days, (nights, technically—usually from about 10pm–6am) and think I would've gone out of my mind without experienced midwives to keep an eye on me and look out for danger signs (falling fetal heart rate and rising temperature, a sign of infection). Even as it was, the midwives joked that I belonged in the Guiness Book of World Records.

Because of the experienced midwife and her two apprentices, I avoided a caesarean (though not, alas, a hospital birth; mine, which pissed me off, was according to the midwives a ‘good’ one, so I can barely imagine the trauma other pregnant people have suffered) and ended up having (more) successful homebirth thereafter, resulting in healthy babies who grew to adulthood. The Guardian freebirth article so horrified me I wasn't even able to do more than skim, but was unsurprised that the moms in that story were not so lucky. What happened was heartbreaking precisely because it didn't have to happen! They too could've had the same excellent outcomes I did!

In conclusion: homebirth—sometimes called prepared homebirth, to distinguish it from accidental parking lot type experiences, and/or women who cannot, for one reason or another, access proper pre-natal care, absolutely essential to determine, just for example, whether one is a good candidate for homebirth, because some births are high-risk, and for those, hospital birth is literally life-saving—good. “Freebirth” unequivocably bad.

Whew. That's enough angst for one day. Have a sweet, pretty picture of a beautiful rose.

(1)One complaint about Gothic, frex, is an unconvincing romantic subplot, which after thinking about it for a bit, I realized from a Doylian perspective (i.e. needs of the plot) why the story went that way. Thought about it some more, and felt had the author made a more convincing case a) I would've liked the protag a lot better and b) it would've cranked up the horror even more—win-win. As it was I had to do some heavy lifting/rationalizing as a reader to make it work, because the text as written was for me unpersuasive.

15dec2025

Though based on much older series, I do have beads made recently, i.e. this year:)

Also, links, of course.

• Skydiver and astronomer capture a stunning image of the sun appropriately titled The Fall of Icarus;)
• A version of putting Christ back in Christmas that atheist me can totally get behind:) via one of Slack's commenters.
• Yay, Frieren season 2 is due out in 2026! This anime about an elf and her fellow dwarven and human D&D type campaigners starts at the end of their quest to defeat the big bad, and given her millennia long lifespan, she inevitably will outlive them—so her real quest, to reckon with this, is what the series is about. I rank this right up there with Cowboy Bebop, it's that good.
• One reason I like Frieren is that it's not appallingly violent, unlike, say, the Predator series, which so far I can tell is sort of a competitor to the Alien franchise? Never gonna watch any of the movies but I found Second Wind's analysis of How Dan Trachtenberg Built a Grand Unified Theory of Predator (via) fascinating: the teal deer is that older films reflect cultural anxieties about US colonialism and masculinity in the wake of losing the Vietnam war, and the newer ones recap similar themes vis-a-vis the Middle East.
• Anyway, really enjoyed the analysis (which is sophisticated, i.e. aware of intersectional feminism as a lens) of the films...which, unnnnnh, were not, seeing as they feature alien jaws of these human looking fingers, okaaaaaaayyy, framing mouths consisting of female genitalia, uh, wuuuut? Second Wind acknowledges this, but never really gets into the absolute horror and insecurities men would have to have of women to make such a design choice. (To be fair, Alien also features vagina dentata, and penis headed aliens, which at least has the cachet of both sexes, but again, the chest bursting is pretty clearly a stand-in for pregnancy body-horror—but that actually speaks to women just as much!)

Oh yeah, something new, something blue—beads! Enjoy.

13dec2025

Oh, look, holiday-themed earrings, I should post those!

And gee, I even have an intro, that I wrote exactly a year ago:

---

Ow, ow, ow. When the dr tells you not to lift anything over 5lbs (about 2 KG) after your top surgery/double masectomy for at least 4 weeks, they mean it, even if you were lifting 20x that just before the surgery, because while the muscles are plenty strong enough there are all these internal stitches connecting said muscles to your skin & subcutaneous tissue, and that interface, er, yanno, wound, is not.

This includes cast iron dutch ovens fulla casserole.

And no, clamping your elbows to your sides to recruit your biceps and engaging your core is not a suitable workaround.

(Up till now I wasn't able to pick out the various origins of discomfort amongst the cacophony of drains, adhesive rashes, compression garments, but now I can, and have a much better sense of what that pain is and what's causing it. [And oh yeah, 2025 me—a year out from this surgery—would like to let you know that I'm still delighted with it, and still non-binary, making my experience bog-standard, despite what the fearmongers would have you believe.] —Thus endeth my public service announcement.)

On what I strongly suspect is a far more interesting note, here's the latest a year old link farm:

• Via FTB, Why I stopped being anti-Woke by some youtuber named Darkmatter2525—I got about 20 minutes into this hour long monologue, and concluded I had the same problem with this guy that caused him to fall down the anti-SJW/progressive rabbithole in the first place, which is that I have not very much patience for his irritation at losing all that white male privilege to which he automatically felt entitled as an adolescent. I'm happy he's matured, but, eh, still kinda annoying. Which you know? not my cuppa tea, and that's fine; it's pretty clear I'm not his, either, and that's okay!
• Here's stderr's and commenters’ favourite youtube/spotify/podcasts. Goodie.
• How to Get Rid of Dowager Hump (aka fixing that hunched text/computer posture) —I've done most of these exercises either as part of my KB workouts or had them prescribed by PTs, but it's nice to have them collected together.
• Angela Collier has a long-form video about Richard Feinman, a brilliant physicist for whom brilliance was not enough: he wanted to be (perceived) as a towering genius on the level of Newton or Einstein (not to mention super-sexy) —a sort of Indiana Jones of physicists—and in the US, by and large, he succeeded; but at the cost of women and girls dealing with ‘Feinman bros’. I never encountered that, but I did know a Heinlein bro, and it was pretty much the same obnoxious white-male obliviousness (that, say our dude Darkmatter2525 suffered from during his adolescence...) I loved this exploration, but if sexism is just a meh issue for you, it's not gonna appeal.
• Liking this list of 10 Best Nonfiction books for 2024

Or, yanno, check out some three year old earrings, based on a design that dates back at least to 2017...I'll have some newer beads, soon, promise!

27nov2025

Like a lot of people I've been utterly charmed by the reports ganked from that study about urban versus rural racoon differences, to wit, the urban ones have shorter snouts, possibly an indicator that raccoons are in the very earliest stages of domestication. Of course, mainstream media being what it is, some of those outlets are trumpeting, ‘Raccoons will be the next big pet/domesticated animal!’, leading the bits of the paper that I thought far more interesting, that did happen to be emphasized in the article where I first encountered it, to be ignored:

This is a citizen study, done by high school students! Their science teacher wanted to engage them with something more interesting than reading out of a textbook, and experiments are absolutely the way to teach science. In this case, (IIRC) the students found images tagged with the animals’ location and then measured images of them.

Second, their research was so robust it was accepted into and printed by a peer reviewed journal. Cool science is being discovered by ordinary people all the time, and while cutting edge science that requires fancy labs and lots of funding (and years of training) should absolutely be funded (not undermined...sighhhhh) the best way, in my not so humble opinion, to get people on board with that is do some science themselves, so they have a greater appreciation for it.

Besides, as the kids discovered, it's fun.

So why, you might wonder, do shorter snouts lead to all these domestication claims? Well, my (very) lay understanding is that domesticated animals—humans being a particularly good example—undergo changes in the timing of their maturation such that they retain neonatal (childish) features, such big foreheads, flattened faces and smaller jaws—think about the way we compare to our closest relatives, chimps and bonobos, then how puppies, kittens and foals all look compared to their adult forms—big foreheads, flatter faces, smaller jaws.

Besides the smaller snouts the other big difference between urban raccoons and their wilder-living counterparts is that they're more comfortable with people, as anyone living in a city who's also gone camping can plainly attest. Raccoons (and squirrels, boy howdy, squirrels, of any urban species) are much noisier and willing to approach people. I mean, I hear raccoons on a regular basis screeching over my compost bin, and squirrels will practically run over my feet on the deck, whereas I barely see and never hear them while camping. You could argue there's less predation in cities, excepting coyotes are supposed to have widely colonized urban areas, and I myself regularly see hawks and hear owls at home. (In fact, the closest I ever got to a hawk was while it was consuming a squirrel in my front yard. So lack of predators can't be the reason the local rodents are so much more aggressive.)

Since the theory is that dogs and cats started domesticating themselves by associating with people, it doesn't seem that far-fetched to suggest that someday, squirrels or raccoons could become domesticated. (Especially if we biohacked the process by identifying the genetic changes that would predispose these animals—after all, if in a few decades foxes could acquire the floppy ears, curly tails and spotted coat patterns of domestic dogs strictly for breeding them for tameness, what with the leaps and bounds of genetic engineering, it doesn't seem that far-fetched to identify the markers differentiating domesticated animals and then emphasize/insert/create them in other animals...)

But then of course the question becomes, but should we?

Not so very long ago there was a movement gaining some traction that we shouldn't even own already-domesticated animals such as cats and dogs, as pets. This more extreme position seems to have died down, but I note that pet owners are expected, at least in theory/ideally to do a lot more for their pets nowadays than, say, 50 years ago—I hardly ever see dogs in collars anymore, but instead in the less choking harnesses; it's far more common to spend hundreds, even thousands of dollars on medical care, and most of all is the more collaborative relationship being promulgated: providing plenty of enrichment with play, or developing more robust communication, as with buttons.

Under those parameters, I think the argument can be made that it's perfectly ethical to have a cat, dog or other domesticated animal in one's household. Frankly, I love those instagram posts where people excitedly show off their horse's desire to do do a fancy capriole move for the joy of it, or accept that today is not a riding day: they've given their horse the right to say no.

I s'pose what I'd like to see is a more collaborative relationship between the world, including its fauna, and us—bird feeders strike me as a classic example, and giving crows treats in exchange for picking up garbage (shiny things they tend to collect anyway) as a modern one, because in neither case is the animal coerced. In any event, behaviours encouraging us to see ourselves collaborating with the environment, alongside other living things, absolutely strikes me as the way to go.

That connection is indeed something to be very thankful for.

And speaking of cats and dogs, here's a nice doggie;)

26nov2025

I'm now on the 4th or 5th or something round of the great office tidy, the part that moves all my 2D media—watercolours, gouache, acrylics, waaaay too many acrylic mediums and bottles of ink, conte crayons, coloured pencils, oil pastels, regular pastels, pastel pencils, water-soluable coloured crayons, charcoal, liquid graphite and solid ink (why yes, I buy this stuff the way the fashion conscious purchase clothes, or quilters & sewists fabrics, and after 40 years or so, it's kinda piled up) downstairs into the office, so that the desk upstairs can be re-purposed as a stringing area. But! I also have cluttersome tabs on the desktop, soooo sometimes my links take off on their own. (Cuzza social media always, always attempting to slurp up more attention, amirite?)

I tend to be leery of youtube's algorithm, cuz I don't wanna be sucked into ever more radical rabbit holes, but somehow or other —possibly because I was in the other room—I ended up listening to Jessica Kellgren-Fozard's Is Harry Potter Ableist? and really liked it. I realize most people have long since given up on Harry Potter because of the creator's transphobia (which oddly enough was the problem I addressed in my own HP fanfic, i.e. why aren't trans folk, let alone genderfluid people, switching sex as a matter of course, years before she made it such an issue) and racism (also an element in my story), but it never occurred to me to have such fun stuff as magical wheelchairs or other cool aids, which Kellgren-Fozard mentions in passing as issues addressed by disabled fanfic authors.

I really liked hearing about this fresh (to me) take on Harry Potter, and recommend her perspective highly. She also has a bunch of links from other points of view, a couple of which I've already seen, enjoyed, and can recommend:

• Contrapoints, and of course
• Lindsay Ellis (part of her Death of an Author series, also highly recommended—well, just about anything by this author, really)
• Shaun's, while not on the list, is also good:)

Two of the new ones I sampled were Kat Blaque's and Lily Thompson's brief look at Harry Potter, at a mere 10 hours long. I bailed at five, not because I wasn't finding it entertaining but because I disagree so strongly with one of the creator's most staunchly held beliefs, that the Law of Secrecy, the maguffin that allows the speshul wizarding community to exist secretly alongside the mundanes, needs to be abolished, & her constant beating on that drum just wore me out.

This comes out of how much readers are willing to give conventions a pass—HP is a modern faery tale/fantasy from a child's POV, hence the incredibly evil foster parents, lack of psychological damage from their abuse, horrendous lack of oversight and safety at Hogwarts (though I had to make my headmaster analogue a villain to get that to work properly) —all hallmarks of classic faery tales or other kid fantasies, and drawing the line is a bit different for everyone. (Think of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia stories, for another example of how the universe really doesn't hang together, once you start thinking about it—100 years of winter, what did everyone eat?!) —And while both Simpson and I are aware of these conventions, I'm clearly more willing to accept them.

The thing is that while one can set up a universe with all these appalling social defaults, (say, to provide something for the characters to strive against) that doesn't mean you as author have to valorize them. I mean, I can kind of see how a European-descent white lady (ahem) might write a story full of sexism, racism, fatphobia, ableism, queer-baiting and the like (at least, till fans started writing in and pointing out these problems, at which point, you know, apologies and efforts to improve are the order of the day) but practically from the get go, the underlying rule of this universe is might makes right—thus, because Harry and friends are the heroes, it's okay for them to —just to cite a particularly horrifying example—obliviate their foes, or even their parents.

So the question then is, why? For the youtubers, a generation younger, who grew up with HP, it's a sentimental part of their childhood. For me, it generated lots—lots and lots and lots—of interesting critiques in the form of fanfic, and I enjoy that sort of thing. And finally, as I alluded yesterday, there are a lot of really juicy world-building details: not only are the adults’ power subverted (as is the case in all good faery tales) but the world focuses on kid-appealing elements—lovingly described wands, or cool classifications (the Houses, each with their own color scheme, totem animal, founder, motto and ostensible philosophy), all the differing brands of brooms, the lovingly described and delicious food (for which the kids can absolutely choose, with no veggies nor indeed parental oversight to require your eating them). What lovely wish-fulfillment! but also, and I think crucially, a dollop of garbage pail kids style grossness. Remember those? And the moral panic by parents?

I do.

I mean, think about the snot flavoured jellybeans that russian-roulette the tastier flavours, Hagrid's blast ended screwts, the spells that do disgusting things to the kids (losing one's arm bones is one of the less horrid that springs to memory) —and all played for consequence-free laughs because the text mostly justifies this stuff as ‘just the way things are’. Rowling's special magic is a gift for transmuting the real world's ills into an enticing alternate universe in which the pain is explained—or magicked—away.

So, whilst all we complainers are spoiling the fun worrying about the ethics of turning objects into living creatures (or worse, turning porcupines into pincushions) or chopping up mandrake roots that are real little people while they scream in agony, or angsting over the fact that house-elves are literal slaves (never mind the habit of some families of mounting their heads on the wall like trophies, iccckkkkkkk) or—or—or...kids can just focus on the surface delights and disgusts of these vivid details.

And that, I believe, is why so many people find Harry Potter compelling.

Why I found it compelling. Had I read it as a child, I suspect I would've found bits mildly...unsettling on a subconscious level; even as an adult, it can take awhile (or others’ critiques) before I figure out why something is problematic. As it happens, I didn't read HP till I was an adult, and by that time I had enough experience with the genre to find it mildly entertaining, but nothing extraordinary: this essay is basically, why yes, HP has lots of problems, but here's why I think kid-me (& all the people who far more deeply mourning the loss or attempting to figure out how to ethically enjoy it) liked it in the first place.

In effect, I'm pushing back—just gently, I hope!—against the very valid critiques (because no-one who doesn't love HP makes a 10 hour video about its flaws)—as to why folks , even now, get sucked in.

Speaking of old media, have a link to some mixed media featuring the Met's splendid (and, come to think, rather HP-esque) Cloisters.