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Current Location: my couch

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i no longer remember what tags i use

Physical: Asia aka muscled people are muscle-ing

i’m watching physical: asia which is a reality show about fit people from different apac countries coming together to take part in intensely physical challenges

i’m 17 minutes into episode one and they’ve only introduced korea, japan and thailand so far and these countries’ athletes are literally standing around talking and not doing any challenges yet… and and and holy fuck.

i feel the pressure to hit the gym help they all have insane arms *looks at my arms* is it time to sign up for crossfit?

also this exchange took me out:

the korean athletes talking among themselves about thailand: i think they’re scared. they’re intimated. we’ll take them, easy.
one of thailand’s athletes, eyeing korea: they’re actors. i believe they were fitness influencers before they were athletes. *his teammates nod* japan’s the bigger threat.

nevermind the mongolian team just arrived and now everybody’s scared absjwbswjzbsjxbs

so i started watching this because my workmates were talking about it, and sometimes i forget they see me as a straight girl (and i forgot how cishetero some of them are) until a lady colleague pointed at me and a different lady colleague and went, “all you girls, go watch physical: asia and tell me which man you like” and at first i was like “huh?” then i had a moment of realization about the world she lives in and the world i live in LMAO

the australian team just came on and they’re running around cartwheeling and high fiving the other countries’ teams. the east and southeast asian teams look so confused by their friendliness i can’t 😭

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12/11/2025. OR. The day I decided I was done with my job.

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The Friday Five on a Saturday

Did you get an allowance as a kid, and if so, how much was it?

Nope. I could earn money for doing chores, but it was never a guaranteed tranche of money. And by chores I mean things like washing and hoovering the car, or heavy yard work, not cleaning my room or doing the laundry or dishes. Those were just expected.
How old were you when you had your first job, and what was it?

I was fifteen. I tutored a classmate in pre-calculus at community college where I took summer classes. She paid me $10 per session and would take us both for coffee afterward in her fabulous beat up orange Corvette. We were both so happy when we got our final grades and she went from getting a D to a B+. I often wonder what happened to her.
Which do you do better: save money or spend money?

Oh, spend it, for sure. If I'd been better at saving, I'd be in a much better financial position. But would I have had as much fun? I think not.
Are people more likely to borrow money from you, or are you more likely to borrow from them?

The former. I don't like borrowing money.
What's the most expensive thing you've ever bought?

A house.

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Collage Journaling: Xmas 2025 #3

At the risk of spoiling a DW friend, here is a card I did tonight.

Current Mood: Still exhausted

An Overdue Update

Okay, so the last you all heard, we'd moved into my in-laws' downstairs spare bedroooms. We're still there.

In the aftermath of the move, my brain went into "overload" mode, and hasn't shifted from there since about the end of March. Which means there's huge chunks of adulting that my brain has basically locked off and said "nope, not looking at those". End result: we haven't progressed very far in the search for a permanent place to live; in the meantime, the property market in my home city has become that much more expensive, so our options are even more limited.

We know what our budget is. The problem is the only things available at that price point are effectively "dog box" apartments built in the 1960s and 1970s (so they're needing a lot of renovation or maintenance) which don't have much more space than the area we're occupying at present, and it would probably send both of us stir-crazy inside about three months. Or there's "park homes" which come with the disadvantages of being located further away from where I work than where I currently am (I'm starting to get a pressure injury on the underside of my right thigh from driving for at least an hour each way two times a day four days a week) and which require a "site fee" to be paid on top of the cost of the actual "home" itself (basically, they're on-site cabins in a caravan park, and you have to pay the caravan site rental on top of the cost of purchasing the physical cabin), as well as not really being much larger than the space we're in now on top of things, and not being the best-insulated living spaces either (so higher costs for heating and cooling on top of everything else).

We're still looking (hope springs eternal, after all).

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Theosis and liveblogging

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Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: Birthplace

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Big day!

Went into town and met up with A today! It was a lot of fun! We derped around poking at stuff a lot, particularly art stuff, which is always fun! :D

And then there was multiplayer Terrarira when I got home! Which was ALSO fun! Just, both of those things in one day was a lot.

However! I did manage to get an SD card, and it booted as an install device and... um. Pretty sure the entire computer is running off the SD card, and it can't see the freaking internal SSD. Which is a problem! So tomorrow there will be Some Research. But also I'm going over to catsit for A overnight - she's going for a family Christmas thing that's too far away for a day trip - so idek how much I'll actually get done. Still! Progress has been made, which is always nice! :3

Also even if I don't have an actual fix tomorrow I'll get to poke around the new desktop environment and see if I DO actually like it, which is also important! (The place I have it set up for installing the OS is also not great for actually using the computer, simply due to the fact that if I'm installing an OS I want to have my desktop on as well so I can Do Computer while waiting for shit to download/unpack/install, heh.)

Anyway, bed now. Am very sleepy! Hopefully I can get to sleep without pulling the blanket out since I'm... not gonna be here tomorrow night and who knows what the weather will do... it's Quite Warm and I suspect I will melt in my usual doona.

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science!

more on visual culture in science

This morning I am watching the lecture I linked to on Tuesday!

At 6:53:

Here is an example of how the Hubble telescope image of the Omega nebula, or Messier 17, was created, by adding colours -- which seem to have been chosen quite arbitrarily -- and adjusting composition.

The slide is figure 13 (on page 10) from an Introduction to Image Processing (PDF) on the ESA Hubble website; I'm baffled at the idea that the colours were chosen "arbitrarily" given that the same PDF contains (starting on page 8) §1.4 Assigning colours to different filter exposures. It's not a super clear explanation -- I think the WonderDome explainer is distinctly more readable -- but the explanation does exist and is there.

Obviously I immediately had to stop and look all of this up.

(Rest of the talk was interesting! But that point in particular about modern illustration as I say made me go HOLD ON A SEC--)

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Poet's Corner: The Carolers by Ed Skoog

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advent

Music: Christmas Time is Here

I have been running up a large sleep deficit trying to get a lot of things done. I ended up taking an involuntary 20 minute nap today and feel much better. Let's have some music.

Watch on YouTube

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I'm quitting the job.

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endometriosis

[surgery] one year on!

I continue extremely grateful to no longer have ureteric stents.

( a bit of stock-taking )

Current Mood: geeky
Current Location: Birthplace

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New! Computer!!! :D

It came!!! :D :D :D

( Extremely geeky linux rambling here )

Anyway, the keyboard-computer bit is pure white, so I'm thinking it'll be called Reshiram, since I've been on a pokemon kick for a while. Though maybe Kyuurem since the screen is black? Not sure. Will think about it, since I'mma reinstall the OS it's not something I have to decide yet!

Other than all that, really not much today, hahaha. I did washing, and cleaned the catboxes, that's about it. Also fic reading and some Terraria. But mostly new! computer!!! And attendant geekery.

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🧠🩹

gah.

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Current Mood: professionally efficacious
Current Location: at work

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resources

Survey your level of job burnout today! (not a scam)

I've joked throughout the past few years that "argghhh i'm burned out at work" but only recently did I realise it wasn't a joke, haha! So I read about it and I found this interesting way of defining job burnout that helped me clarify my experiences better.

Dr Christina Maslach gave a talk about Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), a survey developed by her team that you can fill in.

Here's a free copy on Scribd, though officially the paid version on Mind Garden's costs ~50 USD.

( How to do the burnout survey, profile yourself, and the 6 organisational factors causing job burnout according to Dr Maslach )

That's my infodump of the day 😼

side-tracks off side-tracks

One of the things I found yesterday, while getting distracted from transcription by regretting not having taken History and Philosophy of Science (or, more accurately, not having shown up to the lectures to just listen), was some tantalising notes on the existence of a four-lecture series entitled Visual Culture in Science and Medicine:

Science today is supremely visual – in its experiments, observations and communication, images have become integral to the scientific enterprise. These four lectures examine the role of images in anatomy, natural history and astronomy between the 15th and the 18th centuries. Rather than assessing images against a yardstick of increasing empiricism or an onward march towards accurate observation, these lectures draw attention to the myriad, ingenious ways in which images were deployed to create scientific objects, aid scientific arguments and simulate instrumental observations. Naturalistic styles of depictions are often mistaken for evidence of first-hand observation, but in this period, they were deployed as a visual rhetoric of persuasion rather than proof of an observed object. By examining the production and uses of imagery in this period, these lectures will offer ways to understand more generally what was entailed in scientific visualisation in early modern Europe.

I've managed to track down a one-hour video (that I've obviously not consumed yet, because audiovisual processing augh). Infuriatingly Kusukawa's book on the topic only covers the sixteenth century, not the full timespan of the lectures, and also it's fifty quid for the PDF. I have located a sample of the thing, consisting of the front matter and the first fifteen pages of the introduction (it cuts off IN MID SENTENCE).

Now daydreaming idly about comparative study of this + Tufte, which I also haven't got around to reading...

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Rec-cember Day 10: Murderbot

Wikipedia has a pretty goog summary, for those who are not familiar with the books:

The Murderbot Diaries is a science fiction series by Martha. The series is told from the perspective of the titular cyborg guard, a "SecUnit" owned by a futuristic megacorporation. SecUnits include "governor" modules that control and punish the constructs if they take any actions not approved by the company. The ironically self-named "Murderbot" hacked and disabled the module but pretends to be a normal SecUnit, staving off the boredom of security work by watching media. As it spends more time with humans, it develops genuine friendships and emotional connections, which it finds inconvenient.

It's got humour, emotional depth, action; it's the perfect comfort read, because Murderbot grappling with what it means to have free will and catching ~~human cooties~~ feeling is weirdly heartwarming. Murderbot is the best protag, I swear. I can't believe I saw this series mentioned around for years and never checked it out because I thought it was going to be gruesome, since its titular character is called Murderbot, ha. It's now also a tv series,starring ~~Brad 'the Iceman' Colbert~~ Alexander Skarsgård. The tv series is fun, a good adaptation, really, but the books are far superior, imo.

All these stories probably contain spoilers, so do not read them if you haven't read the books (you won't be safe if you've just watched the show, I supspect).

In Control. 8K words. Four times having a governor module fucking sucked, plus one time [REDACTED: FILE MISSING]. (Or: Murderbot has Emotions for 8,000 words. ART tries to help. So does Dr. Mensah, but like, in a decidedly less assholish way.)

Re-Initialization. 38K words. When the infamous rogue SecUnit of the Preservation Alliance gets captured, the corporate techs assigned to it expected to be able to get some juicy data, or at least some insights into its cracked governor module. They didn't expect something so… basic.

Changelong. 377 words. helpme.file: Changelog Various additions made by the units who pass along Murderbot’s governor module hack. Tremendously fun!

The Pitt

I adore how most of fandom has decided that Frank is a good guy, despite his many flaws, that he has fallen head over heels in love with Mel and that he'd do anything to be with her. Sometimes I like a darker interpretation of canon, though. In this vein, let me offer you my kingdon for a horse 14K. Langdon drives Mel home after the longest first day in the world. This is an amazing fic, so perfectly in character, hot and it packs such an emotional punch. The ending is absolutely brutal. It needs many more hits, kudos and comments.

Thanks!

Dine and Killerweasel, I received your cards today, thank you both very much.Oddly the one from KW had been opened. There was no notation to indicte when or where or why. As I recall when I used to buy off ebay any parcel coming from the states was stamped to indicate it was opened at the border. Maybe the pretty ribbon that had a thin strip of wire triggered a beep from something. Who knows? In any event, alls well, but I just found it a bit strange.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: Birthplace

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Fweeee

Wow I'm suddenly really tired. I wasn't until like. Five minutes ago. Which given the time is actually pretty weird, heh.

Anyway! I forgot to say yesterday, Sushi has been banned back into the cone full time, because he licked his tail enough that part of it was a raw pink colour, siiiigh. It healed up again pretty quick, so I don't think it was actually raw, but we're not gonna let him do it again! Nope!! We'll see how the tail looks tomorrow, since that's when he's supposed to be fully healed, but I'm guessing I'll leave it on another day or so to be sure.

Honestly didn't do a whole lot today, annoyingly. But I DID get to play multiplayer Terraria for a couple of hours, so that was fun! Had to finish early because of my father's bday dinner, though, which was also great!

( Food rambles )

Other than all of that, mostly just reading today. Some solo Terraria this evening too, but that's about it. According to the tracking new computer should be here tomorrow! It maintained it was gonna come today until mid-afternoon, even though that was clearly not gonna happen (it wasn't even in the right city yet!), but hopefully tomorrow is accurate! Am excite!!! :D

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gunpla

Tanks A Lot

It looks like I forgot to mention acquiring a pair of tanks from M at comic-con. They're 1/144 scale and were priced right (as in, I would have paid but didn't have to) and I finally got one built and painted with some paint markers I was trying out.

Because I am silly, and the best thing to do with German WWII tanks is be silly, here is Astray Blue Frame 2nd with a tank:

Blue white and orange model of Gundam Astray Blue Frame Second, a humanoid piloted robot, kneeling beside a matching model tank on a green cutting board.

Blue white and orange model of Gundam Astray Blue Frame Second holding the matching model tank in its hands as if she is offering it to the viewer.

The tank itself needs a bit of glue at some point to not fall apart at the tiniest of movements or drafts, along with a tiny hand-painted snake-mark, but overall it passes the two-foot test and I am pleased. (Blue Frame also needs a bit more work but I misplaced her decals and have gotten varying degrees of annoyed at her color-correction. I'll get there.)