sparr | Reading

I'm struck by how bad I seem to be at making one-on-one plans nowadays. So reliant on being in the same place at the same time with people when I'm much more likely to have an evening free and not know what to do with it.

Tara and Liam are off to Amsterdam or close to it. I hadn't seen them in ages and hadn't been all that much in touch. I haven't been going to the physical therapist in columbia.

I feel like I have much less excuse with pluckedkiwi and Girlinpink. It was only 23 minutes to get home. They leave to move to New Zealand in the extremely near future. Or open house today and I'm only ended at 9:00 but they told me to still show up. I kept noting that they were yawning and they kept saying it was good to see me. I left 2 hours ago but somehow I'm still up.

Others who have left or cathy and Gary to Scotland and my high school friend Faisal and his wife to Portugal.

I spent a bunch of time the other night talking with a lifeguard in Spanish who was from ecuador, which reminds me that Dan is moving to ecuador. But he was planning that long before this election.

(Trying to explain trumpism and Reaganomics in Spanish was an experience. I eventually had to leave to English.)

I find myself wondering how stupid I am that I'm not looking to get out.

Unfortunately it's not particularly any better for Jews anywhere else.

In other news, it was really really good to see people at Simon's party, which is part of why I got there so late to p&g. So it would have been good to catch up with barchan once he got there but I was on my way out

I have to be at Glen Echo in less than 12 hours for a wedding
And I'm still wide awake and I still don't know what I'm wearing. And I would have liked to have time to go swimming beforehand especially since I won't be going to Acro first

Speaking of acro, I fell yesterday, and many kudos to my partner who managed to keep me safe. No biscuit to either of us for not making sure a specific person was identified to spot..

sorcyress

I spent most of the summer not doing my usual morning ritual*, just...travel, and Pinewoods, and surgery, and everything else. With the start of the school year I've gotten back into it, and wow, I have missed reading y'all's journals so much, I'm sorry to have deprioritized it because dreamwidth really is the only social media that I spend an hour on and feel refreshed and connected afterwards.

I'm glad y'all are still out here writing (and if you're someone I follow who hasn't posted in a while, I'd love to see posts from you too!)

~Sor
MOOP!

*Morning Ritual, which has gone through many iterations since 1995, but is mostly fundamentally the same: Wake up, get a bowl of cereal, open the comics, read comics until you've read all of them or it's time to go to school.

Comics were newspaper from first grade until I went to college (one of my favourite things about The Comics Curmudgeon is that he and I cut our teeth on the same Baltimore Sun comics page), by which point the webcomics slowly shifted until they were a morning game. I've got about two dozen tabs I open each morning these days, all comics except for the last two, which are a personal forum for the pie shop folks to blog about their lives, and here. The good kinds of social media!

siderea

Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1882720.html

0.

Hey, Americans! Look sharp, the Trump Administration is trying to play a head game on you about Covid vaccines, and it's apparently working, because I see nobody talking about this in the news or on social media.

There's a lot of complexity and chaos right now about what is available to whom and how to get it. Things are changing fast, especially on the state level. I hope to discuss it in another post, but there's one thing in particular I want to clarify for you.

As you've probably heard, week and a half ago, the FDA changed the authorization for the Covid vaccines, in a way which curtails access. The thing that people are hearing is that for people under 65 years old the Covid vaccines are not authorized with some exceptions.

That's technically correct, but badly misleading. A lot of people hear "not authorized" and stop really listening to the rest of the sentence. They hear "with some exceptions" and assume they're not likely to be one such, and won't qualify to get it, and tune right out.

To be cynical for a moment, you're meant to assume that.

But it turns out you're one of the exceptions. Probably. How can I know that?

The actual language from the FDA authorization just issued ( Read more [2,750 words] )

This post brought to you by the 218 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.

Please leave comments on the Comment Catcher comment, instead of the main body of the post – unless you are commenting to get a copy of the post sent to you in email through the notification system, then go ahead and comment on it directly. Thanks!

sorcyress

Tonight's adventure was going to a Jazz Emu concert with a bunch of my polycule!

The concert was at the Sonia, where I hadn't thought I'd ever been, but I looked up at one point to see the old sign for TT The Bear's Place and had my heart sing. The stage is a lot higher than it used to be, which was good for a concert where we were mostly sitting in chairs looking up to the stage.

He sang a bunch of new songs, interleaved with comedy Bits and other general nonsense. It was a lot of fun to go see a show for a guy who I kinda know of, but don't obsessively follow. Sometimes it's good to have a hundred people for whom you're the ninth favourite thing. I was delighted when he closed out with three of his already known and published songs --it was both fun to hear a live version of something at least two partners have separately made me watch, and REALLY fun to jam out to songs that I didn't know but the people around me were incredibly into. People watching is so good!

After, Tess-Todd-Phoebe-Austin went off to get ice cream, and me and Tuesday loitered for a bit. I purchased a cassette tape, mostly for the utter delight of purchasing a cassette at a kinda divey venue in the year that starts with a 20. This is 1980s shit, and I'm thrilled to be part of it!

We were rewarded by the man himself poking his nose out for the half dozen die-hards who had loitered. He was very clearly exhausted --and his accent is much easier to pin down when he's not Performing, so when he said "I'm exhausted from jet lag" I could make a much better guess about what that meant. But it was pleasing to get in the quick "you did awesome, it was a lot of fun!", and also nice to get that little peek behind the scenes.

It was a really delightful night, and a good reminder that actually there are some pretty awesome little concert spots tucked around my city, and I should find more of them and go to more shows just for the fuck of it. I mean, who has time and all, but live performances are a lot of fun, and I like having them in my life.

~Sor

MOOP!

PostScript: Okay, holy shit, was glancing at the wikipedia page and found out that before he was in full Jazz Emu mode, he wrote one of the best twitter threads of all time? It's rare to have such a Neil Cicierega moment that's not actually by NeilCic!

(the thread is the top song from every decade dating back to the 14000s BC. Grab your headphones, it's very stupid and funny)

[A Neil Cicierega moment is that moment when you are laughing at something funny on the internet, or reminiscing about something old, or being amused by a weird cool thing, and then you realize that it is yet another project by That One Guy]

siderea

I don't know who needs to know about this, but:

I just discovered the Android app "Periodically". It's described as an "event logger". It's for keeping track of when a recurring thing has happened, and figuring out what the average time is between occurrences. You just keep it updated each time the event happens, and it will do the math for you to figure out the frequency, and even give you a notification when it predicts the event is likely to happen again. If you're tracking more than one thing, it will try to suss out correlations for you.

I mention because twenty five years ago or so, I needed exactly this functionality and could not find any application that would do what I needed, so I wrote a thing for myself, and since then a lot of people I've mentioned it to have wondered where they can get one like it. Mine was Mac/Palm Pilot, so not of much use to most people, especially these days.
Lo, somebody seems to have realized the need for this functionality, and brought it to the market. So I thought I'd mention.

Now, in this day and age, a lot of people, especially in the US, are concerned with security. Especially if they're tracking something to do with their health. This app is not specific to health, so nothing about it immediately reveals that it is storing health information on casual inspection; you could use some sort of other term for whatever health condition it is you are actually tracking. So, for instance, If you were tracking how often your migraines happened, you could call that "new box of cereal".

This app defaults to local-only data storage on your Android device, and the developer claims that it only collects "app activity" for analytics, and shares nothing with third parties. It outputs CSV and has an option to back up to Google Drive.

I haven't tried it myself, but it has a rating of 4.6 stars out of five on the Play Store.

Reviewers on the Play Store note that tracker apps that are specific to the kind of event – such as health- specific loggers – often have needless complexity, and often some weird ideas about graphic design. They praise this app for its clean, elegant look and simple, effective functionality.

In addition to its obvious applicability to episodic health conditions, it strikes me as potentially extremely useful in one of the trickier parts of prepping: figuring out one's burn rate of resources. I think I might trial it to help me figure out how often I should expect to have to buy a fresh bale of toilet paper and how long the big bottle of ibuprofen will last me.

vvalkyri

or maybe not i dunno.

I'm down on a long penninsula south of virginia beach right now, with Joe and Bernadette and there's been a bit of an object lesson in "sleeps 2 adults and 3 kids" and it's somewhat tempting to sleep in the living room/kitchen instead of my bedroom in that I absolutely do not recommend these mattresses even stacked, and it's cold tonight so at least the lack of a/c is less of a problem.

today we went to great dismal swamp. the earlier part of this was about 1.5 hours of walking out and back on a gravel road to a trailhead before deciding to go to somewhere else in the car. At that point I was kinda wishing that I had gone to acro. But the rest of the time, the time on the boardwalks was cool. I hadn't seen cypress roots before. Freaky. And the lake. And the swamp near it.

Yesterday I stayed with a couple acro people paddleboarding out to some concrete battleships that are used as breakwater (a bit sad my waterproof camera didn't get better pics), and got some [abrasive] acro in while J and B got really sweaty in their hikes.

Day before, 22k steps including a whole lot of beach.

Sadly it'll be another rather cool day tomorrow. Probably will try to get to the beach at least tho. This morning I was simply way too exhausted and went back to sleep after breakfast.

Back in DC there were 10s of thousands at the We Are All DC march and that was good. Come the 19th there's the We Are America march, where folk started today from Philly.

I've been looking at socials some. And everythign is argh. Turnberry said something about how I'm doing the good fight and I'm like "I'm mostly useless and if it gets to that I'll just die." Conversely he got AR14 training back in 2013.

I'm really not enjoying looking at White House and State Department socials and thinking "It's like Idiocracy but make it malevolent."

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Clarence "Sparr" Risher

February 2025

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vvalkyri - Marking another
sorcyress - (no subject)
siderea - At Least One Underlying Condition [Covid, US, Patreon]
sorcyress - Like a hundred fifty people singing about DVD logos? That part was great!
siderea - Interesting app for Android [tech]
vvalkyri - It's late but I wanted to write a bit

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Clarence "Sparr" Risher

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Marking another

(no subject)

At Least One Underlying Condition [Covid, US, Patreon]

Like a hundred fifty people singing about DVD logos? That part was great!

Interesting app for Android [tech]

It's late but I wanted to write a bit

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February 2025

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