Biarritz

Aug. 23rd, 2025 08:52 am
rmc28: Rachel in hockey gear on the frozen fen at Upware, near Cambridge (Default)
[personal profile] rmc28

Last night I successfully got the jersey I wanted for my team, and many of the people I wanted to draft to my team, and here we are:

Team Lanzarote, just after being drafted

(except one guy who'd wandered off, I'll try to get another group photo with him in at some point, but that one is beautiful; look at those gorgeous jerseys and that sunset sky)

I am so happy with this team. I put in some time and effort to read through the draft grid and make my first-and-second choice selections, and I switched things up as I spoke to people before and during the draft, and in response to how our draft order went on each round. I know I have a bunch of good people, both on and off the ice. In particular I got my captain from last year Sean, who is also the only person here this year who has been on my team in both the previous years. I instantly made him my A, and he's been a delight in the role already.

Three (short) games today and three tomorrow, to see whether I'm as good at picking and running a team as I think I am ...

[food] misc veg salad

Aug. 22nd, 2025 10:59 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

The nature of veg box is that Vegetables for which I have no Plan... accumulate. Today's dinner took a bunch of said accumulated veg and made them salad-shaped, and it worked out well enough that I want a record as a reminder for future self that one can just Do This.

Read more... )

Playlist

Aug. 22nd, 2025 04:38 pm
rmc28: Rachel in hockey gear on the frozen fen at Upware, near Cambridge (Default)
[personal profile] rmc28

A few months ago I heard a love song and thought "this captures how I feel about ice hockey" and thus was a playlist born:

three-plus years in love (with hockey)

Additional suggestions always welcome :-)

full list, with exemplar lyrics )

(previous playlists, titles hopefully self-explanatory:

first game feels
second season:stepping up

I have completely normal feelings about this sport.)

BL trip a success

Aug. 21st, 2025 11:42 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

In brief: book is the least I've been annoyed by any such book I have yet read, which is fairly impressive going, especially since the copy in the BL's collection is the first edition originally published in 2003 rather than the second edition updated in 2013; more notes possibly to follow (subject to reaching a decision about whether I want to hold out for getting my hands on a copy of the second edition before talking about it in public).

Entertainment: shortly after I finally settled myself down in my nice corner desk against a window with my back to the wall and a whole enclosed-in-glass booth between me and Any Other Readers... my watch buzzed to let me know that I'd just finished a Period Of High Stress. The high stress was, obviously, sitting quietly wedged into a corner on public transport while reading a relaxing book. I did know public transport was exhausting! I have been saying! I'm still kind of impressed at the watch Earnestly Informing Me, In Case I Didn't? Know? and mildly regretting that I'm planning to do the same-ish again tomorrow, and also also I am reassessing A Lot of my wheelchair use in light of this...

Related entertainment: how much my hypervigilance kicked up when I returned from lunch to discover that neatly leaving my notebook and reading-book in a stack on my desk had not had sufficient inhibitory effect, and a Noisy Person had decided to sit diagonally across from me, in my Space, being Noisy. The amount I relaxed when they (temporarily) fucked off is another one for the "yep I can see how not leaving the house for over a year and then staying Hyper Local has added up to me looking much more functional" files...

Phone, again [me, tech]

Aug. 21st, 2025 05:10 am
siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
Whelp, it looks like I'm in the market for a cell phone again.

On Saturday night, I noticed something dangling from the corner of my cell phone, which immediately struck me as odd, as there's no aperture in the protective gel case there for something to get stuck. Well, there's not supposed to be. On further inspection, I discovered the corner of the gel case no longer fit over the corner of the phone, and some random shmutzig had gotten wedged... between the back plate of the phone and the rest of the phone, to which it was no longer attached along the bottom. Pressing it back down didn't work: something in the middle of the phone was causing resistance to closing the phone.

Lo, verily, my phone's battery was pregnant.

Some of you who follow me on the fediverse might be thinking, "Wait, didn't you just replace a phone, the battery of which swelled up?" Lol, yes: late April. That was my work phone. This is my personal phone. Lolsob.

So, being a proper nerd, I went right to iFixit to order myself a battery. Whereupon I was stopped by something that did not bode well. I entered my phone's model information and iFixit, instead of telling me what battery to buy, alerted me that it is not possible to determine what kind of battery my phone took from the outside.

It turns out that the OnePlus 9 G5 can take one of two batteries, and which one a given OnePlus 9 G5 takes can only be determined by putting eyes on the battery which is in it.

Well, okay then: I clicked through the helpful link to read instructions on how to pull the battery on a OnePlus 9 G5. I read along with slow dawning horror at exactly how involved it was and how many tools I would have to buy, and made it to step twelve – "Use a Phillips screwdriver to remove the ten 3.8 mm-long screws securing the motherboard cover. One of the motherboard cover screws is covered by a white water ingress sticker. To unfasten the screw you can puncture the sticker with your screwdriver." – of thirty and decided: fuck this, I will hire a professional.

(I think maybe it was a fortunate thing that I went through the prior fiasco with trying to change the battery on the Nuu B20 5G, first, because it softened me to the idea of maybe I don't have to service all my electronics personally myself.)

Alas, it was late on a Saturday night and all the cell phone repair places around me were closed until Monday.

Fortunately, I had a short day Monday and would be getting out of work around 5:30pm. I called ahead to a place that is open to 7pm to ask if I needed an appointment and whether they did OnePlus phones. There was a bit of a language barrier with the guy who answered the phone, but he said no appointment was necessary and whether they could fix my phone would entail putting eyes on it, and please try to come before 6pm to give them time to fix it before they close.

So after work, Mr B took me there, and we presented the phone. Dude got the back of the phone the rest of the way off the phone with rather more dispatch that I would be have been able to, and pretty quickly discovered that he was in over his head. Credit where it's due – "A man's got to know his limitations" – he promptly backed off, and told me to bring it back tomorrow when the more-expert boss was in.

I'm slightly irritated that we made the unnecessary trip instead of him saying, "Oh, a OnePlus, come tomorrow when our OnePlus expert is in", but it did give me the extra time to do more thorough backing-up. I have never managed to get Android File Transfer to work, nor any a number of alternatives; snapdrop.io would only do single files at a time, not whole directories, and, weirdly, Proton Drive, both app and website, doesn't allow uploading whole directories from Android either.

Finally, I saw a mention that the Android app Solid Explorer "does FTP". I wanted to make a local backup to my Mac, but, fuck it, I have servers, I can run FTP somewhere just to get my files backed up off my phone. Imagine my surprise on opening up the "FTP" option on Solid Explorer and discovering it wasn't an FTP client it was an FTP server. Yes, the easiest way I found to exchange files between my Android phone and my MacBook Pro was to put an FTP server on my phone.

Worked fine. My FTP client on my Mac sucks, but I'll solve that another day. (Does Fetch still exist?)

Mr B and I discussed it and decided he'd bring the phone in the next day, Tuesday, to spare me the hike. He returned with the phone, still with the back off, and the news that they had discovered, as I had, you have to get at the battery to even figure out which battery to order. And that he was told that the battery would be in by 3pm the next day (Wednesday). The only surprising thing here is that they could get the battery that fast.

So, today (Wednesday), after 3pm, Mr B took my phone back for a third visit, and they attempted to install my new battery.

It was the wrong battery.

Hwaet! The saga continues... )

[migraine] peripheral vision nonsense

Aug. 20th, 2025 10:54 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

The thing about buying new glasses, right, is that I've been feeling avoidant about it in part because I think I was slightly migrainey the day I had the most recent test done and I was already pretty sure that my vision goes... wrong... when migrainey -- most noticeable when moving, but always... there.

Slightly more specifically: it's neither scintillating scotoma nor loss-of-whole-field-of-vision nor any of the other very classic visual auras; instead it's a sense that I'm not managing to track movement properly along the lower edge and especially the lower corners of my field of vision.

... which matches up really well, actually, with the peripheral vision deficiencies that, er, showed up during my last eye test.

I've been noticing the Weirdness on-and-off for quite some time now, and was dithering back and forth about whether it was just confirmation bias in that I was only noticing it when otherwise migrainey -- but then on Monday, while on my way to my GP surgery to pick up some paperwork, it resulted in the railings I was going past (and that I go past regularly!) causing an extremely pronounced and unmistakeable strobing effect. I am very confident that that is not something I would somehow manage to confirmation bias myself out of noticing most of the time, so, hurrah, Definitely A Migraine Symptom (for lo, on Monday I was migrainey) it is.

The thing that is mildly baffling me is that I can't actually find (admittedly on a fairly cursory search) any description of specifically peripheral vision fuckery as a migraine thing! Lots of mentions of tunnel vision, lots of mentions of classic aura, and one case study in which "peripheral vision" is used metaphorically. So, you know, let the record show, &c.

Wednesday reading

Aug. 20th, 2025 07:43 pm
rmc28: (reading)
[personal profile] rmc28

The Adventure of the Demonic Ox (Penric & Desdemona) by Lois McMaster Bujold
This is something like 14th in the ongoing Penric+Desdemona books. You don't want to start here, it's a satisfying enough instalment in the series if you are already invested in the characters and the family. If I have a criticism I think that like the last two books I found the progress of the book a bit predictable and not very surprising. But I still read it in two solid bites (only separated by the tedious matter of needing to sleep).

The Arctic Curry Club by Dani Redd
This was on the "free paperbacks" shelf at Cambridge North and I picked it up on a whim, and used some of my free time to give it a try. A bit like the previous book, I didn't find it especially surprising but I did find it very engaging, and some very mouthwatering descriptions of food. Our protagonist Maya moves to Svalbard with her partner, who is taking up a research post there, and who turns out to not actually be as supportive and perfect in the arctic night as he seemed in London. When Maya makes a flying trip to Bangalore for her father's remarriage, she reconnects with a childhood friend and starts to dig up old family history. On her return to Svalbard she makes new friends and new culinary adventures.

The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra by Vaseem Khan
A retiring police inspector in Mumbai inherits a baby elephant on his last day in the job, and finds himself investigating one last murder case in his retirement, with occasional assistance from the elephant Ganesha. This was both charming and surprising and I enjoyed it very much.

A snippet from today

Aug. 20th, 2025 07:09 pm
rmc28: Rachel in a white dress and a red neckscarf for the Fête de Bayonne (bayonne)
[personal profile] rmc28

At the airport security check, putting my hand luggage in the trays for xray. The guy staffing the preparation area tells me if I have any electronics in my bag, I need to pull them out. I pull out my laptop and kindle. He asks me if I have anything else, such as a hairdryer.

My tournament buddy Lisa is in fits of giggles. Of all people, do I look like I need a hairdryer?

siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
Yall. I am so tired.

Last thing first. Investigating the other thing, I discovered this. I'll just cut and paste what I submitted as a ticket to Patreon:
I took a break of a few months, and when I came back my fees spiked. What gives?

I just did a month (July 2025) that extremely similar to last January (2025): similar revenues (466.19 vs 458.50), similar patrons (160 vs 162). According to my "Insights > Earnings" page, my total fees went up from 11.4% to the astounding 14.6%. Drilling down, most of that is an eye-watering 3% increase of the payment fees (5.8% to 8.8%). There was also a minor increase of Patreon's platform fee from 5.6% to 5.8%.

That represents a FIFTY-TWO PERCENT INCREASE in processing fees, and a 28% increase in fees over all.

Care to explain? Was there some announced change in payment structure or payment processor fees I missed?
I have received no response.

But the other thing is this: Patreon has dropped my business model.

Apparently by accident.

When I went to Patreon to create the Patreon post for my latest Siderea Post at the end of July, I was confronted with a recent UI update. In and of itself it wouldn't have been a problem, but, as usual, they screwed something up.

They removed the affordance for a post to Patreon to both be public and paid. The new UI conflated access and payment, such that it was no longer possible to post something world-accessible and still charge patrons for it.

I found a kludge to get around it so I could get paid at all, and I fired off a support ticket asking if it was possible but unobvious, or just not possible, and if it was not possible, whether that was a policy or a mistake. I have received very apologetic reply back from Patreon support which seemed to suggest (but not actually affirm) it was an unintentional:
From what we've seen so far, the option to make a post publicly accessible while still charging members for it isn't possible in the new editor. Content within a paid post will only be available to those with paid access, and it won't show up for the public.

Other creators have reported this same issue, and I want to reassure you that I've already shared this feedback with our team. If anything changes or if this feature is brought back, I'll be sure to keep you in mind and let you know right away.
So it's not like the reply was, "Oh, yes, it was announced that we wouldn't be supporting that feature any more," suggesting, contrarily, they didn't realize they were removing a feature at all.

The support person I was corresponding with encouraged me to write back with any further questions or issues, so I did:
Hi, [REDACTED], thanks for getting back to me. I have both some more questions and feedback.

1) Question: Am I understanding correctly, that the new UI's failure to support having publicly accessible paid posts was an oversight, and not a policy decision to no longer support that business model? Like, there's not an announcement this was going away that I missed? As a blogger who often writes about Patreon itself, I'd like to be able to clarify the situation for my readers.

2) Question: Do you have any news to share whether Patreon intends to restore this functionality? Is fixing this being put on a development roadmap, or should those of us who relied on this functionality just start making other plans? Again: my readers want to know, too.

3) Suggestion: If Patreon intends to restore this functionality, given the way the new UI is organized, the way to add the functionality back in is under "Free Access > More options" there should also be a "charge for this post" button, which then ungrays more options for charging a subset of patrons, defaulting to "charge all patrons".

4) Feedback: The affordance that was removed, of being able to charge patrons for world-accessible content, was my whole business model. I'm not the only one, as I gather you already have discovered. In case Patreon were corporately unaware, this is the business model of creators using Patreon to fund public goods, such as journalism, activism, and open source software. My patrons aren't paying me to give them something; my patrons are paying me to give something to the world. Please pass this along to whomever it's news.

5) Feedback: This is the sort of gaffe which suggests to creators that Patreon is out of touch with its users and doesn't appreciate the full breadth of how creators use Patreon. It is the latest in a long line of incidents that suggests to creators that Patreon is not a platform for creators, Patreon is a platform for music video creators, and everybody else is a red-headed stepchild whom Patreon corporately feels should be grateful they are allowed to use the platform at all. It makes those of us who are not music video creators feel unwelcome on Patreon.

6) Feedback: Being able to charge patrons for world-accessible content is one of a small and dwindling list of features that differentiated Patreon from cheaper competitors. Just sayin'.

7) Feedback: I thought you should know: my user experience has become that when I open Patreon to make a post, I have no idea whether I will be able to. I have to schedule an hour to engage with the Patreon new post workflow because I won't know what will be changed, what will be broken, etc. It would be nice if Patreon worked reliably. My experience as a creator-user of your site is NOT, "Oh, I don't like the choices available to me", it's that the site is unstable, flaky, unpredictable, unreliable.
I got this response:
Hi Siderea,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful follow-up and for sharing your questions and feedback in such detail.

To address your first question, I can’t speak to whether this change was an oversight or a deliberate policy decision, but I can confirm there hasn’t been any official announcement about removing the ability to charge members for world-accessible posts. If anything changes or if we receive more clarity from our product team, I’ll be sure to keep you updated.

At this time, I also don’t have any news to share about whether this functionality will be restored or if it’s on the development roadmap.

I know that’s not the most satisfying answer, but I want to reassure you that your feedback and suggestions are being shared directly with the relevant teams. The more we can highlight how important this feature is for creators like you, the better.

Thank you as well for your suggestion about how this could be reintroduced in the UI—I’ll make sure to pass that along, along with your broader feedback about the impact on creators who fund public goods. Your perspective is incredibly valuable, and I just want to truly thank you for taking the time to lay it all out so clearly.

If you have any more thoughts, questions, or ideas, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to take a further look. I appreciate your patience and your willingness to advocate for the creator community.

All the best,
[REDACTED]
Several observations:

0) Whoa.

1) That is the best customer service response letter I've ever gotten, for reasons I will perhaps break down at some other junction. But it both does and does not read like it was written by an AI. I didn't quite know what to make of it, until someone mentioned to me the phenomenon of customer service agents at another org using AI to generate letters, and then I was like, oooooooh, maybe that's what this is. Or maybe not. Hard to say.

2) Though [REDACTED] could not confirm or deny, it sure sounds like an accident, but one that impacts such an uninteresting-to-Patreon set of creators that they can't be arsed to fix it, either in a timely way or at all.

3) "The more we can highlight how important this feature is for creators like you, the better." is a hell of a sentence. Especially in conjunction with "...along with your broader feedback about the impact on creators who fund public goods.". Reading between the lines, it sure sounds like the support people have been inundated by a little wave of outraged/anguished public-good posters, and the support people, or at least this support person, is entirely on the creators' side against higher ups brushing them off. Could be a pose, of course, but, dayum.

So that's what I know from Patreon's side.

The kludge I came up with for the post I made at the end of July is that I used another new feature – the ability to drop a cut line across a Patreon post where above it is world readable and below it is paid access only – to make a paid-access only post where 100% of the post contents are above the cut line.

Please let me know if it's not working as intended. This unfortunately has the gross effect of putting a button on my new post saying "Join to unlock".

So.

In any event, I strongly encourage those of you following me as unpaid subscribers over on Patreon to make sure you're following me, instead, here on Dreamwidth, because Patreon is flaky.

I will make a separate post with instructions as to all the ways to do that. You can get email notifications of my posts (either all or just the Siderea Posts), follow RSS and Atom feeds, get DM inbox notifications, and, of course, just follow me on your DW reading page, all on/through Dreamwidth, anonymously and completely free.

Two goals!

Aug. 20th, 2025 09:16 am
rmc28: Rachel in hockey gear on the frozen fen at Upware, near Cambridge (Default)
[personal profile] rmc28

I joined the university open practice last night, after encouragement from my friend who is actually part of CUIHC (I was in the club, I dropped out two years ago, I plan to rejoin again this October but right now I'm in a weird limbo - eligible to play, lots of friends among the players, but not on any of the membership mailing lists or groupchats). 15 minutes or so warmup and then a scrimmage, with a spanking pace set by the Men's Blues players. It was enormous fun and a reminder of why I do these mad late nights etc. And I got a goal! Put myself by the back door and picked up a rebound, absolutely textbook stuff, very happy with it.

So my count is now:

  • 2 goals in scrimmage
  • 1 goal (actually an own goal by the opposition) and 3 assists in formal games

I'd love to reach the point where a goal in scrimmage is just another Tuesday, but maybe it's time to start a spreadsheet while I still remember each one individually.

(Other good things that happened yesterday: a coffee with [personal profile] lnr, lunch at the Dishoom Permit Room with Mick and Joye, book shopping with Charles, having the time to just sit and read a couple of books, skating lesson and seeing my friend E briefly afterward. Basically, it was a really lovely day of leave.)

victory of the day is GLASSES

Aug. 19th, 2025 10:52 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Ordered, at least, to pick up next week.

Indulgence is a writing slope off eBay with a lucky dip of writing utensils, one of which I am very cheerful about...

Weddings

Aug. 19th, 2025 06:45 pm
liv: Detail of quirky animals including a sheep, from an illuminated border (marriage)
[personal profile] liv
This weekend one of my oldest friends got married, and my partners celebrated their 20th anniversary with a Jewish blessing and wedding canopy. So I had a lovely lovely time, and also I'm very much reminded that there's a crowd of (mostly somewhat connected) people I've been friends with for most of 30 years and I should make more active effort to actually spend time with them because they are awesome.

wedding squee )

I sort of want to see if I can make it to my brother's charity's ceilidh next week. But Friday evening events in Brighton when I have a bar mitzvah in Cambridge on Saturday are a bit unworkable. And although I enjoyed the dancing, what I want more of isn't mainly dancing, it's spending time with people. And waiting for my friends to have reunions in the form of weddings isn't very efficient! I'm amazed that there were even two weddings this year, with most of my circle being in our 40s. [personal profile] jack has planned a bank holiday picnic next Monday; it will be fully outdoors, which is good for infection risk but possibly bad for enduring summer weather. But if you happen to be in Cambridge you're most welcome.

Fitocracy paces

Aug. 19th, 2025 11:21 am
jack: (Default)
[personal profile] jack
It works! I added a toggle to the running app I use Fitocracy to display paces instead of speeds.

The first time I've done anything on a regular android app, and the first time I've really edited an open source project.

Fitocracy was the only app that could show me current speed, average speed, and average speed for less than the whole run without unrealistic hoops. But i was annoyed the speeds were in speeds, not paces.

Hopefully that is just what I need myself. I will try to get it into the original project too as it seems like a worthwhile improvement.

vital functions

Aug. 17th, 2025 11:02 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Reading. Allie Brosh, Stuart Adlington, Liam D'Arcy + Grace Hall, Rosie Reynolds, Helena Attlee, Jeannie Di Bon, Mary Jane Paterson + Jo Thompson, Raymond Blanc )

Cooking. One more thing from East (kimchi pancakes, mildly disappointing) plus a gooseberry oat crisp I have been meaning to get to since I started picking the pink gooseberries [mumble] ago.

Eating. Ruby Violet (hazelnut + hazelnut brittle, blueberry + lemon curd). buns from home (cardamom, cinnamon, garlic + rosemary focaccia).

My first granadilla, courtesy of a whim in a supermarket!

Allotment apples and tomatoes.

Exploring. Spent a chunk of Monday afternoon poking around the Camley Street Natural Park!

Growing. There are TOMATOES. There are BEANS. I harvested some PEPPERS. I'm still not doing great at, like, efficiency or yield, but hey, I'm eating some things from the plot, which is better than none.

Ten years

Aug. 17th, 2025 09:40 pm
rmc28: (charles-champ)
[personal profile] rmc28

So, the tenth anniversary of my diagnosis with leukaemia happened earlier this week. I usually celebrate my survival on 1 October each year, but I'd wondered a few months ago about having a party in actual summer.

In the end I didn't organise anything for this weekend because I had a hockey game with Warbirds yesterday. This morning I took Nico to Clip n Climb, and this afternoon I met Rosie for a public skate and then we had ice creams in the sunshine. On my way back to my bike (locked by the rink) I ran into a couple of people and sorted out a few things relating to Kodiaks and next weekend's Draft Tournament in Biarritz.

Also the announcement has just gone out that I'm captaining one of the teams in Biarritz, and I'm off work now for nearly two weeks.

... and actually all of that adds up to a fantastic "up yours cancer, you didn't kill me", even without throwing a party.

Take it away, Elton:

[books, embodiment] further grousing

Aug. 16th, 2025 11:14 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Just, you know, For My Own Reference: a list of the exercises included in Hypermobility Without Tears. I am going to come back through and add links to Pilates and physio explainers for all of these.

Read more... )

Events of note

Aug. 16th, 2025 09:42 am
rmc28: Rachel in hockey gear on the frozen fen at Upware, near Cambridge (Default)
[personal profile] rmc28

In news that shocks no-one, especially not me, I didn't actually manage to watch the streaming Twelfth Night in the two week window. I had two windows in my calendar and I spent them on other things, woe is me.

ice hockey )

Charles and I went to see the reissue of Princess Mononoke in the cinema - in the IMAX screen - yesterday evening. I haven't watched it in many years but it holds up, still very beautiful. Some scenes I'd never forgotten but other parts surprised me all over again.

From the film I went to a goodbye party for two of the cricketers for a couple of hours. I left the party for ice hockey practice, and was briefly tempted to message the partiers when I came out of the rink at 1am to see if they were still going but actually by the time I got home and showered I just wanted to sleep.

(I have been added to the casual Saturday afternoon cricket groupchat. I am still very bad at cricket, especially at bowling, and have no kit. I could turn up anyway I guess.)

kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Jeannie Di Bon is a "Movement Therapist" who "specialis[es] in Hypermobility, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and Chronic Pain." In the introduction, she talks about her own experiences in a way I find very sympathetic:

I've lost count of the number of times a doctor has told me it's all down to IBS and instructed me to eat more fibre and try Pilates or yoga to relax. Dismissive in its nature and kind of ironic now, as I trained to become a Pilates teacher in 2008.

And, you know, the actual core (yes I did that) of her Integrated Movement Method is sound: she's giving advice about fostering body awareness, of when and where you're tense and when you're not, working through a pretty standard sequence of breathing exercises and gentle movements. All the exercises in this book are the kind of thing that show up pretty early on in any full-body physiotherapy programme, that have loads of progressions available (particularly within the Pilates model), and they're absolutely fine and probably useful to folk who've not been able to access care covering this kind of topic.

If it were just the exercise programme, it would be ... fine. More or less. I think a bunch of the ways she explains movements are unclear and counterintuitive, but hey, presumably they work for at least some people.

Unfortunately, there are all of the bits in between.

Chapter 4 is where they went from "okay, you're simplifying to the point of lies-to-children but you are also explaining why" to "... either you're deliberately misrepresenting things for personal gain or you're wildly incompetent", and I'm still not sure which of those it actually is. (I am trying not to think too hard about the possibility that the answer is "both".)

Read more... )

tl;dr there is nothing you will get from the Integral Movement Method that you won't get from competently-taught or -explained Pilates except scaremongering and misdirection... and unlike IMM, you can get decent Pilates resources for free. Don't bother with this one.

kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

I am now well over halfway through the book, and spent most of chapter four screeching to anyone who would listen about the extent to which either she is deliberately and cynically misrepresenting approaches that aren't Her Personal Programme in the interests of selling the latter, or she's just incompetent.

The actual suggested movements -- the strength-building and the stretching -- are totally reasonable, and also totally standard. It's the surrounding framing that has my eyebrows crawling into my hairline; I... tried to summarise and rapidly discovered I was launching into the full rant, and it's past bedtime, so let's start with: while there's a References section it's a whole 15 items long, and she's blithely saying "X states" or "Y says" as though the fact that something has been published in a single peer-reviewed paper means that it's unquestionably true, and of those fifteen one is a systematic review of any kind and... Several... are under the aegis of an organisation specialising in complementary medicine.

More details tomorrow, probably. With excerpts.

finally it is tomato o'clock

Aug. 13th, 2025 10:40 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

a tomato with a dark purple upper and red lower, speckled with gold

(This cultivar is called Blue Fire. I was very late getting my tomatoes started, but I am about to have lots of them and I am excited by this! Rainbow planting didn't quite work partly because none of the Yellow Pear-Shaped made it but largely because I lost track of which were my purple plum tomatoes and which were instead my orange, but -- I'm about to have A Bunch of ridiculous coloured tomatoes, and this is probably the showiest of the lot of 'em!)