Wordle went hard core today.

Fitting political commentary about Elon Musk and T Rump into a five-letter word puzzle is pretty impressive.

There are really too many of us on the planet, living too close together, for reading and thinking in isolation to be an effective life strategy.

The term 'social media' is a misnomer, in that there is no media that isn't social.

The audience of media is humanity, and all human beings are social animals.

Whether media is read, watched, or listened to, the audience interprets it within a social context.

And whether the conscious intentions of media creators are to share, connect to, influence, inform, educate, entertain, or persuade, the underlying goal of all media is to change society.

People understand, or fail to understand, media, according to their personal perspective.
Their mental models, if you will, of the world.
This doesn't just include their current social context. It has been inextricably influenced by how they have been socialized since birth.

One of the potential benefits of what we call social media is that we can invite others to help us step outside of or expand on our personal perspective when forming our understanding or expression of things.

This potential is severely undermined when people limit those social media interactions to being with people whose perspectives are unduly similar to their own.

It is so hard when people try to normalize their own pain experience as though everyone else is the same, and ignore what we say because they are ignorant of how these things can vary.

Some of us are in pain all the time, but ALSO do not necessarily feel very hurt when we suffer an injury that others find extremely painful.


When I was young, mom says I would have ear infections that would have left my sister screaming in pain, but all the sign my mom would get from me is I'd twiddle my ears with my fingers. In high school I was sick with a sinus infection but doing tech for the Nutcracker ballet. I was busy. The next week I saw the doctor. "You recently pictured your eardrum," she told me," the scar tissue is fresh. You would have noticed. It would have been excruciatingly painful." All I could do was shrug.

The third time my dad had a pierced lung he didn't have a car on hand, so he asked an MD friend if it would damage him to walk to the ER. The answer was not really, so he walked across town and in to the ER, told them he had a punctured lung (again) and they told him he would not be walking and calm with a punctured lung, and sent him to the waiting room. An hour later they took scans. When they looked at the scans finally they ran out to the waiting room and urgently put him in a wheelchair and were, like, "you have a punctured lung!" As though he hadn't told them that in the first place.


When I tore my rotator cuff, I knew something was wrong right away. Told the person at the other end of the heavy loveseat we were carrying, "I just lost my arm. Hurry up and let's get this in the truck." Then I went on a business trip for the weekend. I couldn't pull anything with that arm, but it didn't hurt. Went to the doc (my GP) the following week. She observed no reported pain and full range of motion and sent me to physical therapy. One month of PT later, I had lost range of motion and she finally sent me to the orthopedic surgeon, who examined me for five minutes, had me move my arm with his thumb pressing on my shoulder, declared I had a huge bone spur on that shoulder that had to be removed, and scheduled me for surgery. After surgery I asked what I should and shouldn't do, and he was, like, "let pain be your guide." I was sure I was fucked on that count, but he also gave me a permanent lifting limit of 30 lbs for that arm so I go by that.

In the meantime, I also have chronic pain from many former injuries, surgical scars, and chronic conditions. I think these two experiences are connected, to be honest. When you are flooded with pain signals, how do you detect lesser ones? How do you tell which ones mean something's actually wrong? It's hard, but it also just makes sense, logically.


When I was in junior high and high school, I started having debilitating headaches. My math teacher taught me to mentally "move" the pain out of my head to elsewhere in my body with a visualization technique, which made it possible for me to take tests again. My mom took me to a neurologist, who had me stand on one foot and touch my nose with alternating fingers, etc, and declared me neurologically normal. He was useless.
Eventually I just didn't pay attention to my headache, though sometimes if someone asked how I was, I would notice it and suddenly be in pain. After college my sister and I went on a road trip on which an accident with the car left me experiencing shooting pain down one leg when I walked, having exacerbated an old back injury from running my bike into a moving car. After the trip I went to see a chiropractor for the first time. "Yeah, I can fix your back," he said,"but your worst misalignment is in your neck. Do you ever get headaches?" I still see a chiropractor every two weeks, and it helps.

Fast forward ten years and my whole family was in my kitchen - mom and dad, my sister, my husband - getting dinner ready. I was tired and not really paying attention to anyone for a minute, sitting at the kitchen table. My sister exclaimed something about the expression on my face, like I looked like I was in pain. My mom concurred, indicating I looked "like you're in pain and want someone to help you." I straightened up, wondering how they could not know this about me. "I'm always in pain," I reminded them, "I'm just tired right now, so it showed."

These days I do have high pain days and low pain days, but I'm still always in pain. Like my tinitus, sometimes it's louder or quieter, but it is always there. I don't get to experience silence anymore, and I probably never will. I can no longer quite recall what not feeling pain was like, though I do remember that sometimes, when I was very young, I didn't have it.

If you are similarly atypical, I hope people in your care team understand.

Sharing a comment I posted on a FILE 770 discussion in reaction to the closing of the Orlando Florida bid for the 2023 NASFiC (North American Science Fiction Convention):

I have helped run a couple of NASFiCs and support continuing to have them, so long as they are scheduled at least two weeks apart from that year’s Worldcon and therefore do not preclude attending both.

One of the arguments for having a NASFiC has always been that international travel is prohibitively expensive for many while others cannot manage the travel for physical or health reasons. As a Hybrid mode of technology + convention planning improves, virtual attendance from a distance and with concurrent language translation may gradually reduce the strength of that argument. But that time is not here yet.

With regard to a national convention, I would rather see a North American one that is inclusive of Mexico and Canada, or an American one that includes Central and South America, though sadly the success of such an effort looks like it would require reversing the current trend of making it harder to cross those borders.

As a U.S. fanhistorian, I would hypothesize that a large part of why we do not have a NatCon already is that the combination of having large regional cons and having up until this century held most of the Worlcons in the U.S. have caused enough of a call on the time, energy, and treasure of U.S.ian conrunners that we haven’t had the capacity for mounting an annual roving national convention as well. But the country is just too big and too poorly connected for fast transit for us to situate a NatCon in one city for the duration, as many smaller countries do.

Many of the overseas conventions this century have still leaned heavily on the predominantly American/UK/Australian “floating Worldcon Committee” of experienced WSFS members dedicated to helping the Worldcon succeed wherever it is hosted. I think an overlap of volunteers from year to year valuably assists in knowledge transfer and continuity, though of course there must be a balance in welcoming new volunteers, ideas, and fannish cultures. I hope that committee members of non-North-American Worldcons will be encouraged to continue the practice of joining other committees so the “Floating Worldcon Committee” becomes more of a worldwide network of collaboration and support.

I did not know most of this history, though I had seen other mentions of forced desegregation leading to the firing of black teachers.

https://prismreports.org/2022/05/13/new-england-struggling-retain-diverse-teachers/

Especially if you live in Boston, you should read this.

There is a trend lately for cons affiliated with nonprofits to take advantage of Google for nonprofits to use gsuite for email management and file sharing. These are useful tools, but what happens when the convention is over?

A couple of years ago I helped out with Capricon, then later went to look something up in those files, only to find that my account had been suspended, without notice, subject to my signing up to help the following year.

I would posit these tools unless used thoughtfully, actually threaten necessary connection making that oils the gears of both sf community building and conrunning in particular.

Because we are using gsuite, for instance, we don't always tend to maintain even a spreadsheet version of a concom directory. Some gsuite admins turn off people's ability to edit their own profiles, so often the gsuite directory includes only a name and the con domain specific email. No personal email, and no phone number. No picture, not title and department.

If I'm running a con later and want to recruit that great assistant ops head, how might I look him up and contact him, unless we happened to have exchanged info directly?

If I have been cut off from that account and the files, how can I go back and make sure fanac got a copy of the pdf versions of our pubs, or grab a copy of the text of a bio I want to post on sfbios, once I get permission from the author?

Unless I already saved a local copy, I can't.

I could go on with examples from programming and art show and other departments, but I expect you get the point. I hope convention IT admins will think carefully about how info is or isn't archived, how you communicate with volunteers about what's happening with their accounts, and how you set permissions and fields for profiles in the directory.

I also encourage every such volunteer effort to have your crew opt-in to a directory of personal contact info or social media handles to distribute before you go your own ways after the event. Being a volunteer can be one of the best ways to make friends. Let's support the flowering of those friendships.

Rosie's synchronized swim duet is done for the season, so no more having to get her up for 7:45 am practice on Saturday mornings!

I woke up this morning on my own, with no alarm, stretched for a while, took my pills, fed the cats, and had a quiet breakfast of two eggs, a clementine, a quarter of an avocado, lightly salted, and my morning powder medicine in half a cup of apple juice.

While cooking I enjoyed one of the pinwheels Rosie baked yesterday, filled with a dollop of strawberry jam and dusted with cinnamon sugar.

I worked on the shopping list a little, checking to see what ingredients we have for the carrot cake we are planning to make Sunday for the birthday of a college student who is staying with us for a few months, and also did some strategizing for an upcoming rearrangement of rooms.

As I have been predicting literally since we bought this house, Rosie has now decided she would like to move out of the small room next to ours with the carpeted floor and pretty wallpaper, into the larger corner room, which has two windows, a closet twice the size, and walls she can paint to her own whims. That room has been serving as a craft room, so of course we have to empty it before she can move in.

We are also hoping to garage sale some of the little kid stuff we don't need anymore, but Rosie's synchro team has one more meet, in CT on June 4, and the following weekend we'll be busy with Pride, so my strategy cannot expect things like the kids kitchenette in the basement to clear out until sometime later. I like operational geekiness, though, so this is fun.

Rosie has a swim meet first thing in the morning, so she took a shower and her father braided her hair, knoxed it, and set it in a bun. While the knox (gelatin) set her hair into a hard shell, she sat practicing her Russian on Duolingo and I trimmed and buffed her toenails and fingernails.

She has started cutting her own nails but just like anyone has a hard time staying on top of her smallest toes, and she has recently tended to want to wear her fingernails longer than is practical for a violin player.

When I was 11 my sister sometimes cut my nails, and in my memory she was nearly always irritated at me when she did so, because of the clicking of my fingernails on the piano keys, she said, when I practiced. I did not get very far on the piano, but I did master cutting my nails short and smooth and round.

I am not irritated when I cut Rosie's nails. I like to do it when she lets me. After I finished, she put the phone down, started her sleep cd of assorted classical music, and asked me to read to her.

I am presently reading to her from Anne of Green Gables. At the beginning of the series Anne is also 11, so this feels pretty appropriate. We are on Chapter VII. As I read the voices I can almost hear the voices from the Canadian miniseries of the same name. I have a copy of it but Rosie has not seen it yet. I hope in another year or two to watch it together.

She drifted off quickly and i must to bed myself/ We have to get up tomorrow and drive an hour and a half before we are due at the meet at 8 AM.

Goodnight.

We're back home in PA, having a recovery day from yesterday's travel. I'm finishing sewing paw print masks for the Rainbow Rose Center pet photo contest prize packs. Tonight we have our monthly Board Meeting.

Last week on Thursday before we headed back to MI to visit my parents and retrieve the child, I performed a story as part of the USA Today Storytellers Project. The idea is to foster a sense of connection with other people in the community. I told a story about Family Photos.

The whole show is available at https://fb.watch/6uQU9Li6Ic/
My bit is around 24:40. The stories are all on different topics and each about 8 minutes long. I thought they fit together well.


The main photo I gush about in my story is on fb here: https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10157845074005723&set=a.10150089360345723

Can I insert it? hmm.

On Monday I slipped on a mossy step and fell and skinned my right knee. It is healing well, but I still don't want to kneel on it.

I injured my left knee in high school playing soccer and didn't have PT to stop it from giving way until ~ten years later-- during which, they discouraged me from putting my weight on just that knee So ever since 2002, if I needed to go down on one knee or get up on a knee to rise, I did that on my right knee.

After I fell, I sat up and literally wondered how I was going to get up to standing. I eventually used both hands and kind of spider walked up onto my feet without touching either knee to the ground.

Just now, I was sitting on a nice plush carpet sorting laundry, and thought to myself, "I bet you can kneel on your left knee here to get up." So I did. And of course, it was fine. I have been strengthening it regularly for almost 20 years, and it has not given way once since I started that PT regimen.

But it was so hard, mentally, to switch to the left side for that!