Incidents and Accidents, Hints and Allegations

A farewell post

mrigashirsha@gmail.com — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 01:46:07 GMT

This is a farewell post to LiveJournal, Facebook, and Twitter. When I finish writing it and get it posted, I'll be deactivating my Facebook account and deleting my Twitter account, and setting my LiveJournal account to lapse to free status. I'm not sure what I'll do about LJ comments yet, so that's to think about later. This is going to be long, so see below the cut tag if you'd like to see my reasons and plans.

Here's my situation. As my regular readers know, I am crawling back from the lip of the abyss, with the goal of achieving as much physical health, mental and emotional well-being, productive creativity, and social engagement as I can muster. Parts of my current crisis date back to the last couple-three years (like grieving for Dad's death), parts about five-six years (like the cascading health failures that seem to stem from something specific shifting my hormone balance in a really bad way), and parts across various thresholds all the way back nearly thirty years to when my immune system first collapsed. It's a big legacy of sickness and misery, and recovery won't happen overnight.

But neither will recovery take forever.

I am, right now this afternoon, a hundred pounds or a bit more overweight. My dream is actually to get more like a hundred thirty pounds off, but I don't know how far that's feasible. But a hundred, at least, needs to go. So that's a minimum of a year's work, and more like two to three when factoring in the inevitable ups and downs.

As I do that, I need to develop a lot of overall physical fitness. If I look at a clear practical goal like 10,000 steps per day, for instance, I find that I'm maybe a third of the way there after a year of regularly working to build it up. So, again, two to three years.

I'm in counseling for depression and other stuff. Does two to three years to make real progress there seem reasonable? I think so. Not to solve everything, but to get into a qualitatively different overall state of mind, yes.

I've got this game book to write...and that "urk" was the sound of Fred Hicks thinking "Two to three more years for New Horizons?!?" Well, no, honestly not. :) More like two to three months of first draft, then playtesting, revision, editing, and publishing. Then there's still Whispering Vault 2nd to do just because I want to do it, whether or not there's still any market for it, and there's....well, there's stuff. Two to three years to get a new writing career built up? Yeah, that does seem reasonable.

What I've got to do, though, is stop all the stuff I started doing because I couldn't do what I really wanted to. My whole life, approximately, for much of the '00s has been gap-filling things to keep me from just drifting altogether. But now I have the things I really want to do—or just plain have to do—happening!

So it's time for me to take the promises I've made all along seriously. Many of you have heard or read them; lots of you have been encouraging, and told me that, of course, when I could do the things I'd lost I would indeed go for them. This is promise-fulfilling time.

If you want to e-mail me, please feel free—I'm not going into hermitage, and mrigashirsha@gmail.com is no secret. I'm just dropping stuff that's been more wear than reward for a while now, and which (most crucially) I can't control the way I need to right now.

(Someone may be wondering, and sensibly enough, "What about promotion of new public work, when it's time for that?" I don't know yet, but I'm aware that it's a thing to deal with and will work out something when it's time. You will hear, believe me.)

I am an angry camper

mrigashirsha@gmail.com — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 23:06:18 GMT

I'm angry about the fact that every time I stick my head up into public view, people I know for sure have seen me talking for months about how I'm reducing the stresses political argument is taking on me keep piling on political commentary, chit-chat, gossip, sniping, and other such crap. I'm pretty well giving up on public appearance for now; I can't protect myself by any less drastic means.

Comments are turned off. I don't need or want any feedback on this. I'm just explaining my silence—it's necessary if I'm to have any hope at all of working on either my health and depression or my writing.

Ye olde checking in

mrigashirsha@gmail.com — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:08:19 GMT

Still not dead, just still enjoying net inactivity.

I'm also into my second month of my new agenda: throw lots and lots of politically heavy weblogs and forums into my /etc/hosts file so that I can't read them, and budget some each month to give to groups fighting fights I consider worthwhile. There's precious little I can do as an individual, particularly in an era when the issues important to me are treated routinely as promises to trample on not reluctantly but gleefully once candidates who promise to address them get elected. So I'm giving money to groups outside the Democratic Party that can put pressure on issues that matter to me. It's not a lot, but it is something, and it is way better than nothing.

I'm feeling a lot less of that despairing sense of futility, and this makes it much easier to disengage from pointless arguments.

Recommended.

I remember the good old days...

mrigashirsha@gmail.com — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 16:57:39 GMT

....when you went and just bought a gorilla suit, dammit, and none of this fooling around. Typical American degradation by overspecialization.

My "statement of purpose" moment

mrigashirsha@gmail.com — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 05:32:11 GMT

For a while now I've been noting two parallel phenomena:

#1. I've been detaching from a lot of kinds of online interaction—blogs, forums, instant messaging, etc.,
and,
#2. I've been doing a lot of self-appraisal and reappraisal in general around counseling and medical matters.

A bit of philosophical context is in order here. There is (I'm pretty sure) a real world and things within it either are or aren't a particular way. But both the kinds of categories we recognize—species, for instance, and planets versus other kinds of things orbiting stars—and the range of options within them—like the number of kingdoms of living species—are our constructions. The real world seems to have a lot of "yes, but" and "well, mostly" and such-like fudge factors built into it very deeply. We draw lines, but the lines are there because we chose to put them there rather than because they are all necessarily truer and better lines than any alternatives, and the fact of the line may not coincide nearly as well with the facts about what's out there in the world on each side of it as we'd like.

I've got a lot of personal taxonomy to revisit just right now. For instance, now that I know more about what the effects of acute low blood sugar are for hypoglycemics and diabetics, I find that I need to rethink how I've labeled past acute episodes I've associated with the immune problems I have. Likewise, as I think about what kinds of help I need and what kinds of help I'm gettting, I'm shuffling around some of my sense of priorities about medicine-related politics. The list goes on and on, and into a bunch of categories and options I'm not really up for writing bout at the moment. All, of course, while I am trying to get work done. :) (And doing some, and enjoying it, too, I must say. It's great when that works out.)

What dawned on me today was this:

I've been detaching from a lot of kinds of online interaction—blogs, forums, instant messaging, etc.,
in order to
do a lot of self-appraisal and reappraisal in general around counseling and medical matters.

Here's the connection: any argument rests on terms. There are—there have to be—some assumptions about who we are, and who any "them" outside is, and about the scope of the argument we're having, and the means of argument that are acceptable and what they imply about what good argument (and arguers) look like, and on and on. But that this point, a lot of that isn't a given for me. I'm not sure what I want to grant or rule out. I mean, what I know for sure is that I have habits developed to try and deal with the world despite being horribly depressed and dragged down by a bunch of junk I hope to shed. How far that'll matter for any particular kind of interaction I have, I don't know, but I'd really rather not assume that it's all okay-fine unless something really explicitly pokes me hard. I'd much rather set it aside and lay pieces back only after I've had a chance to think them over, look at them from new angles, polish them up as may be, and then return them to the board.

Written out like this, it seems kind of obvious to me. Maybe it was obvious to some of you already. But the shift from "and" to "in order to" is one that feels illuminating to the landscape here inside my head, and it's light I'm glad to have.

"I have no response to that." - Meg Ryan, in Joe Versus The Volcano

mrigashirsha@gmail.com — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 05:07:46 GMT

Products Amazon customers felt deserved the tag WTF?

You put it in the yard, of course

mrigashirsha@gmail.com — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 19:31:53 GMT

Fantasy and sf statuary.

Reading tip: Very Short Introduction series

mrigashirsha@gmail.com — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 17:08:05 GMT

If you want to know something—not everything, but enough to get a basic competence—about a subject, right now your best bet is very likely to be Oxford University Press' Very Short Introduction series. This is wonderful. Each volume is less than 200 pages long and is written by someone with real clues about their subject, often an up-and-coming scholar making their mark on the field. I've read half a dozen of these now and found them to range from very good up to outright excellent; I've no doubt some others in the series won't be as good, but that's life for you. I am so happy to have tried these out, and recommend them very highly.

Do my homework, ID edition

mrigashirsha@gmail.com — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 01:35:20 GMT

Turns out that nearly everything I have about fake IDs, pseudonyms, cover identities, and the like in the early 20th century is espionage-related. Anyone want to recommend resources about the use of identity deceptions in civilian life?

You betcha this is New Horizons fodder.

Still better off than Franco!

mrigashirsha@gmail.com — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 01:18:35 GMT

I remain alive.

Actually, I remain alive, mostly mellow, and increasingly productive.

I finished up my first quarter on Weight Watchers with a total reduction of 19.2 pounds, and I'm done with my three-session diabetes training course. The last one, on long-term care, was tremendously informative and greatly encouraging in its emphasis on prevention and management of complications.

My #1 thing right now is fatigue, and it comes because my sleep cycle's even more chaotic than usual. It will stabilize, though, I just need to keep experimenting with times and circumstances of rest.

And now you know!

Left-y thoughts on American health care, August 2009

mrigashirsha@gmail.com — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 19:02:47 GMT

Locked because I'm interested in having my thoughts written down, but not in arguing about it.

#1. Government-backed universal health care works. The alternatives don't. The range of roles for the government is very broad, but lots of thing work as long as the state's committed to providing an accessible minimum of good care funded out of general revenues and other sources that are fundamentally not about fee-for-service. The US would benefit by adopting anybody's model, whether it's Canada's, Taiwan's, the UK's, Germany's or whatever. Every single one of the alternatives provides better care and therefore improved liberty and quality of life for its citizens than what we've got.

#2. There is no reason to believe that any great benefit will follow from any health care bill likely to clear this Congress and President, and substantial reason to doubt it. Avedon Carol's doing a lot of the heavy lifting on this. There is properly a really high burden of skepticism that we should make legislators and the executive lift cleanly when it comes to showing where gains will come from. And individual mandates are a really terrible idea in the first place. Anyone who's been poor and had to deal with "subsidized" charges knows how this works: you pay the fee in full up front, you get your help late, in part, and restricted in ways you weren't warned about in advance. There's a popular confusion at work. People don't need insurance. They need health care. Insurance is only a means to that end, called into play when other ways of paying for the care are ruled out.

#3. It would really be nice to see less opposition grounded in lunacy and lies. It's tempting to figure that anything that attracts that sort of crazy evil response is actually a good idea. Alas, not necessarily so.

I'll have more to say when there's actual legislation to evaluate.

New Horizons reading notes

mrigashirsha@gmail.com — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:55:54 GMT

I've been depressed lately and realized that, yes, part of it is from my research reading. Kevin Boyle's Arc of Justice is the single most discouraging thing I've yet read for New Horizons.

It's not the most horrifying and enraging. That would be Slavery By Another Name, by Douglas Blackmon. Blackmon's book is about just how much of the slave-owning structure of Southern society survived and even flourished in the decades from the end of the American Civil War until World War II. Anyone who can read it and not come away enraged and horrified isn't someone I'd care to know. But there's this: it's about the abuses of power, and every decent person of any political outlook must know that power...I don't think power corrupts, just that it offers more opportunities to indulge in whatever corruption is already lurking within. The raw theme that people with power can and will do monstrous things won't be a surprise to many of my readers, even though the scope and nature of particular abuses may be surprising indeed.

Arc of Justice is different because of its focus, the racial violence in Detroit in the summer of 1925 that culminated in the trial of Dr. Ossian Sweet and 10 others for murder, with the lives that brought them and others to that spot. It's depressing in that it looks at the violence and cruelty of those without power, the working-class neighborhoods which could and did turn out hundreds of people to attack black people and destroy their property. The big picture is, again, not likely to be news to many of you: prejudice is alive and well, and flourished then and there. It's the depth of it, and the stupidity of it, and the horrors of the deformations wrought in lives because of it.

(Edit: Specifically, it's watching person after person in the lynching mobs explain how they as working-class white people felt that having a black doctor move into the neighborhood would bring the threat of violence for their men, rape for their women, and general degradation and chaos, and that therefore they had to engage in violence and various kinds of assault to protect their peace and well being. Reading this while seeing anti-health-care mobs on the news was particularly grinding, and certainly contributed to increased pessimism about the risks of violence this time around, too. The lies told by authorities then and now to back up the mobs and protect them once incited contributed, too.)

I just didn't expect it to be quite such a drain on my soul, and I note it in a cautionary way for others. It's an important subject and Boyle handles it well. Just...wow. It's time for a few days with fluff, I think.

4e: skill challenge tiles

mrigashirsha@gmail.com — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:12:42 GMT

Kynn brings the awesome to D&D 4th edition GMing with this set of printable templates for skill challenges strongly inspired by power cards. Check it out!

New Horizons: The temptation of the outsider hero

mrigashirsha@gmail.com — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 01:31:56 GMT

This is a first take on something that's actually going into New Horizons.

=-=-=-=-=

One of the most important questions you need to ask yourself, as player or GM, about a campaign involving characters outside the social mainstream is, "Who are the heroes here?" There's a particular trap that's really easy to fall into that I want to give particular attention to.

Western literature is rich in characters whom it's very sensible to call "outsider heroes", both historical and imaginary. One of our classic frameworks is the community where something is wrong—an external threat, internal strife, or both—into which an outsider comes who illuminates the problems and plays a crucial role in their solution. We see it in the lives of prophets, in tales of chivalry, and right on down into pulp's own era with Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest (successively riffed on in film as Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars, and Last Man Standing, among others). When roleplaying games take up social interaction, they often do it in this spirit, too, with the characters bringing to bear something the rest of their environment lacks and needs.

It's good stuff, too. If you think I'm going to tell you to knock it off, fear not, nothing of the sort.

But there is nonetheless a recurring problem here when it comes to stories involving people of color, or groups of women, or GLBTQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transexual/transgendered, and otherwise queer), or politically marginalized, or for some other reason cut off from the political, social, and economic center of their world.

There are a lot of stories in which a bright, enlightened white guy (or, sometimes, a white gal) comes among the marginalized, realizes their need, and galvanizes them into action. He (or, sometimes, she) may actually lead them, or inspire one of them to rise up and lead, but in either case, the good things that follow happen because our white hero was there in the right place at the right time. Examples relevant to pulp gaming run all the way from Tintin among Africans, Indians, and Chinese people needing to rouse against tyranny down to the black tribes of 10,000 BC patiently waiting for the white guys who will lead them to freedom.

This isn't to say that all such stories are bad, either. This is a very important distinction to keep in mind when you're evaluating and analyzing works that take up themes involving the marginalized and oppressed. The Tintin stories, for instance, have a great many real merits, and if you didn't read them as a kid, it's well worth seeing if your local library or bookstore has some, because they tell stories very much worth swiping from. Bias undercuts good work but does not destroy it; it's just that when you find bias in action, you have to deal with it along with whatever else the work may offer.

New Horizons is not intended as a sourcebook for this sort of outsider hero story, however. There are likely things in it you can use for the purpose, if you're so inclined. It's just not what I've been working on.

The problem from the perspective of the people within a marginalized community is that making the white hero key to their liberation strips them of what moral philosophers and ethicists call agency, the power of independent choice with moral consequences. People who aren't moral agents are moral patients, the subjects of others' ministrations, and this is not the status of genuinely responsible indiivduals and communities. If all they can do is recognize and submit to the white hero once he comes along, why bother with any further moral development? And while there is some great storytelling to be done that focuses on sidekicks (including John Carpenter's wonderfully loopy Big Trouble in Little China, featuring a sidekick who has no idea he's not the hero), it's thin compared to the potential for adventure and drama in the lives of those who are their own heroes.

Further, setting up a campaign with the expectation—verbalized or assumed—that white heroes will be at the heart of it makes it that much easier to turn away our gaze from just how awful individuals and groups closer to the seats of power have been to the rest. White people, white men in particular, aren't all monsters, but it's not possible to look at the full scope of American (or world) experience in the era of New Horizons and see more heroes than villains and enablers of villainy.

More white people in the '20s voted for Ku Klux Klan members for offices all the way up to governor than did anything to fight against institutional racism, to pick one of the central conflicts of the time. The American Civil War itself was far from an unmixed crusade against the evil of slavery, and after a peak of federal support for the rights of people of color in Reconstruction, it had been downhill pretty much ever since. By the 1920s, entire neighborhoods of people who were presumably otherwise decent were willing to rise up and burn down the homes of black neighbors, and all across the country, white factory workers and housewives joined violent protests to keep black physicians and architects from destroying the quality of life in their neighborhoods. Sometimes white people intervened on the side of justice, as Clarence Darrow did in the case of Ossian Sweet; many more were the problem, and many, many more simply watched it all go by, and very often, whatever justice there was going to be relied on the work of black activists supporting their own people.

The same is true of the other big conflicts of the era, and for that matter of later ones—the Stonewall riots that gave birth to the modern gay rights movement were not instigated or led by straight sympathizers or even by relatively influential upper-class and professional gay groups, but by people they considered dregs and outcasts. This book will present more examples of the diversity of historical precedents for heroes among the outsiders of different sorts. It's my hope that you'll come away feeling that you have the material with which to play out great stories about them, rather than stories in which they're someone else's supporting cast.

Bias and the white writer: Writer's lives matter

mrigashirsha@gmail.com — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:37:32 GMT

There's some controversy in the sf world about Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF, and about the defense of its author list mounted by Paul di Filippo. Angry Black Woman has the roundup, in her inimitable style, and it would be fair to say that di Filippo is not covering himself with glory on this one.

The key question is, should an editor trying to sample the field widely pay attention to writers' personal backgrounds—their ethnicity and sex, for starters—or not? I want to argue here that an editor interested in the best sweep should for the simple reason that writers' lives matter.

Lives don't determine writing. There are lots of engineering magazine editors and only one Gene Wolfe, but he writes the way he does partly because of what he did at Plant Engineering. I don't know of any other trout fishermen and masters of frugal living who write like Howard Waldrop, but his life shapes his prose, and the way he writes them. Robert Heinlein didn't write The Forever War or 1968 and it seems like a safe bet that Joe Haldeman isn't going to write Starship Troopers, in part because each had such a different experience of war. The Draegera series wouldn't be what it is without a painful divorce along the way. And so on.

This is all a commonplace. We—that is to say, the readership that is mostly white and mostly male—recognizes all of this, as entirely true on the individual level. We are not surprised to learn that Caitlin Kiernan is a paleontologist or Peter Watts a biologist, and while we may be surprised to find that behind the facades of Cordwainer Smith and James Tiptree Jr. were two people who knew the intelligence community from the inside, we take that information and see fresh things in their work. We accept it: lives matter.

The idea that, however, lives across the big social fault lines, like ethnicity and sex and gender and orientation, do not matter rests on nothing much more solid than the desire that they not. In spirit it's not wildly different from the creationist's grudging admission that, sure, breeds exist and breeding works, micro-scale evolution like antibiotic resistance in bacteria does happen, and all of that, but there mustn't be larger-scale evolution because there just musn't be. But lives keep on mattering. Steve Barnes has lived through things none of his co-authors have, and they've all had experiences he can't, because he's black and they're not. Alice Sheldon dealt with things Eric Linebarger didn't. And so on, and so on.

So yes, if you want to survey a field in search of the sweep of its current set of cool ideas, you need to cast your net widely enough to actually get out of your particular little cove, no matter how important it may seem from this vantage point. It may actually be important: you may be fishing in San Francisco Bay, or Puget Sound, or off Cape Cod. But there are still bays and rivers and oceans beyond where you are, and if you don't make an effort to go look in them, you simply can't have any idea what you're missing.

Combined Weight Watchers and New Horizons update

mrigashirsha@gmail.com — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 14:46:29 GMT

Weight: Well YEAH! Down 2.2 pounds for the week, and across my first threshold. I now weigh a touch under 95% of what I did when I started on Weight Watchers, 11 weeks ago. I'm in touch with my doctor about the pace, and he agrees that it's fine, and mostly the result of early improvements from changes in carbohydrate intake for the sake of diabetes management.

New Horizons: Solidly back in the research groove, and hoping to commit actual prose this week. I've also got a hook my playtesters like - essentially, Leverage 1925. More on that during the week, I hope.

Temporarily surfacing

mrigashirsha@gmail.com — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 04:39:57 GMT

I feel a bit chattier, so I've got iChat on again for the moment. I'll see how I do with it over the weekend. No promises, but I feel like it's time to experiment.

Animal news worth surfacing for

mrigashirsha@gmail.com — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 17:38:20 GMT

I'm getting multiple friends all telling me about this purely delightful story of a bobcat kitten making friends with a fawn after both were rescued from one of the fires in the Santa Barbara area. You should go read it too, it's good for you. (And thinking about donating to those rescue folks. They're in a bind.)

Combined Weight Watchers and New Horizons update

mrigashirsha@gmail.com — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 13:58:34 GMT

Weight Watchers, week 9: down 2.6 pounds for the week, for a total of 11.2 in 9 weeks. And this takes me across a weight threshold, so that my daily point total goes from 44 down to 43. Progress!

New Horizons: I think I'm over the highest hurdles of this ongoing set of new medical challenges, and I'm settling back in to research and zeroth-drafting chunks of the introduction and general advice. Progress!

It's hot and I'm tired and I do have a lot of broody spells, but I'd say the trend is solidly good.

Video management help sought

mrigashirsha@gmail.com — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 07:07:21 GMT

I'm posting this on behalf of a friend:

=-=-=-=-=

C. was playing back some of our little Digital8 videos from her childhood to a friend today, and some of them are getting choppy and bad. It is clear that we have an extremely urgent situation and need to archive all the videos as quickly and as professionally as possible, while not on a professional budget.

We are thinking that, cost-wise, putting the NOT-compressed raw data onto a lot of giant hard drives would be best, then re-archiving them to new drives every few years to maintain the archive.

We have located only one playback machine for this format: Sony GV-D200 but we are not sure if it will be higher quality and able to send the video smoothly to a computer.

We also don't know if there is a more appropriate software than iMovie for archiving on the computer side. Maybe something that can help patch together the choppiness? Like a video Photoshop kind of thing?

We really need to salvage what we can as soon as possible, and we want to make sure that what we actually archive ends up being usable.

Money is tight, but this obviously can't wait. :( There are several hundred tapes, and we need to just do this around the clock once we find something that will reliably and accurately transcribe them.

I'm really stressed out about having all these tapes lost permanently--we had no idea they were failing already. :(

Thanks for any help locating a solution.

=-=-=-=-=

Crunch time, of a sort: going quiet

mrigashirsha@gmail.com — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 06:07:34 GMT

"Gafiate" is one of my favorite words out of sf fandom. It stands for Getting Away From It All. That's what I'm going to do for a couple weeks, maybe longer. Here's how I figure it...

I've been online more or less continuously since the early '90s, and in that time I've built up a lot of expectations—both in my mind and in others'—about who I am and what role I play. I've been that guy who doesn't have much of a life going on, who's around kind of all the time and at erratic hours, who's sometimes giddy and sometimes despairing, on and on. If you're one of my regular readers, you know the drill. By no means all of these expectations are bad, you understand, as I see them now.

It's just that they're anchored in states of mind and body I have been in, rather than what I'm in now.

This last week was full of big surprises, from great to horrible. This coming week will be, too. And probably the week after that. And then the pace of shocks will settle down, I hope, but there'll be consequences and correlaries and all sorts of other stuff too. This is, it's dawned on me, my work right now: this is my obligation, to myself and to all the people who've helped and cared about me over the years, to take the fullest, smartest advantage of the opportunities I have right now to understand what's going on and what I can and should do about it.

Lots of you go quiet in crunch time and its equivalents—getting a big program done, finishing a thesis or dissertation, traveling, and like that. I generally don't for more than a day or so...but then I haven't had an opportunity like this in many years, either.

I may write some journal entries, comments on others' journals, and like that. Or maybe I won't. I will share important personal developments when they're ready to share. Beyond that? I'm off to the injecting, inspecting, detecting, infecting, neglecting, and selecting, as Arlo so rightly puts it. :)

PS: I will be dealing with e-mail more or less as usual, and if you want to know what's up, share funny links, or anything like that, my mailbox welcomes your correspondence.

iPhone/iPod Touch wishlist: mail clients

mrigashirsha@gmail.com — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 15:19:59 GMT

Anyone know of an iPhone mail client that lets you choose the address to send mail from? I've got a couple I keep for specialty purposes and it would be very handy to be able to dump them all into one mailbox. GMail makes it tidy to choose a reply address, but I have yet to see an iPhone OS client that'll do it. Am I missing one?

New Horizons status, special edition

mrigashirsha@gmail.com — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 05:42:18 GMT

Back when I set up the New Horizons research, writing, and playtesting schedule, I built in a month's worth of slack time, figuring that inevitably I'd have health-related or other troubles that would keep me from work some weeks. Well, this is that.
If you just read the New Horizons reports, you can bounce back and catch my general health news in this public entry

I'm really just not thinking very much about pulp or history this week, because I'm busy preparing for the overall goals discussion with my counselor and waiting for test results and researching specialists to discuss with the doctor. And then next week I'll be dealing with what I learn this week. So I figured, don't fret it, just take the time off. I'm going to take the current crop of research reading back to the library and take some time to get my bibliography updated, and figure out where to proceed once I'm through this medical-focus stretch.

Comments are on for this one, since it's an unusual and unexpected entry.

Extending my IM break, and a health thought

mrigashirsha@gmail.com — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 18:27:37 GMT

I've decided to go ahead and leave iChat off on an ongoing basis for a while. The absence of pressure to be alert to stuff coming in on other people's schedules is a noticeable relief to me right now. I notice myself feeling much more at liberty to go off and rest whenever the urge strikes, for one thing—it's not that I think any of you were demanding my presence at the keyboard, but expectations build up and become a confinement of their own sometime. I'm just happier right now exchanging both fluff and substance via e-mail rather than via a long buddy list.

I'm also doing some more LJ friends list pruning, and like that. The more I learn about the nature and magnitude of my current situation's problems, the gladder I am of energy and attention harvested to focus on it.

And that brings me to what is, in its odd way, good news.

I wouldn't rush to call life-threatening vascular problems good news. Nor any of the other things they're testing for. But here's the deal. They're not all manifestations of my existing immune trouble. To the extent that bad circulation is causing my fatigue, for instance, autoimmune reactions and lymphatic disfunction are not causing it. And so on down the list. Each thing that has a separate cause becomes not part of the Big Problem, and the Big Problem becomes that much Smaller. It means that as we can tackle and remove or address the separate issues, what remains will be more manageable than I have thought.

I still don't see a cure anywhere on my horizon. (That is to say, in the next decade or two.) But what I see this week is the possibility of much greater containment than I'd suspected for a very long time.

Everybody needs a little time away, just for the day

mrigashirsha@gmail.com — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 08:22:35 GMT

Given my own stress, having two celebrity deaths that invite a lot of tawdry humor the very next day is a bit much, on top of everything else. I'm taking some time off instant messaging and a lot of my usual blog/forum presence. E-mail still works fine—I'm not so much in a crisis here as trying to stay out of one.