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Saturday, June 13th, 2026 07:52 pm
Books
Finished T Kingfisher's Paladin's Faith, which I think was better than any of the preceding books in that series. I liked it a lot, and I hadn't really expected to, since neither of the protagonists had really appealed to me in the earlier books.
Read Isaac Asimov's 1957 short story 'Profession', which some website somewhere linked to as an example of Why LLMs Are Bad, but which read to me as a strikingly good fictional example of the social model of disability in action. Unfortunately, I don't think Asimov knew that was what he was writing, and I think we were supposed to agree with the historian informing the protagonist that he was the one in a gazillian very special snowflake who was smart and original enough to be worthy of the financial burden of individualised education.
Listened to the audiobook (read by Ali Stroker) of disability rights activist Judith Heumann's memoir Being Heumann, cowritten with Kristen Joiner. I'm unfamiliar with Kristen Joiner's work, but the writing style of the memoir made me think ghostwriter. The narrative voice was... well, the association in my head is "90s middle grade novel", but that might say more about me than it does about the authors. It's that in medias res, "Chapter One. Ring, ring! I awoke suddenly to the sound of the telephone. I started to get excited butterflies in my stomach. Who could be calling me at this time of night? I sat up in bed and reached for the receiver. It was 1991, and I was Claudia Kishi, secretary of the Baby-Sitters Club, and I had my own phone in my bedroom." kind of thing.
That said, nothing wrong with writing something in an easily accessible style so long as you're not leaving important parts out. Not knowing Judith Heumann's life well enough to know what I don't know, I can't speak to the facts, but I can say that the word "bullshit" appeared once in it, which wouldn't have happened in the aforementioned 90s middle grade novel. And she packed a solid amount of real, usable information about activism tactics and strategy, and real disability rights history and organising principles and also disability 101 in there, and with a minimum of inspirational glurge or undue optimism about the present political state of America (it was published in 2021, two years before her death.) It's simplistic but not trite.
Plus Judith Heumann did have a genuinely very eventful and interesting career.
Tech
I got my current self-hosting project working: I can now point my phone (or my laptop) at my RasPi and select a song from the disk attached to it and play that song through the phone or laptop's speakers. (The difficulty was that most of the guides I could find assumed I wanted to use my phone to control a RasPi with a speaker attached to it, so I could play music hosted somewhere other than on the RasPi.)
Weather
Wet and cold.
Cats
Dorian experimented with a salchow too, at least once. He also was kind enough to demonstrate for me today that he can reach the one remaining kitchen bench I thought he couldn't get up on. At least this way I know he can do that. Meanwhile, Ash has the salchow locked in, and is now innovating with other Birdie eradication methods, such as a crocodile death roll.
Finished T Kingfisher's Paladin's Faith, which I think was better than any of the preceding books in that series. I liked it a lot, and I hadn't really expected to, since neither of the protagonists had really appealed to me in the earlier books.
Read Isaac Asimov's 1957 short story 'Profession', which some website somewhere linked to as an example of Why LLMs Are Bad, but which read to me as a strikingly good fictional example of the social model of disability in action. Unfortunately, I don't think Asimov knew that was what he was writing, and I think we were supposed to agree with the historian informing the protagonist that he was the one in a gazillian very special snowflake who was smart and original enough to be worthy of the financial burden of individualised education.
Listened to the audiobook (read by Ali Stroker) of disability rights activist Judith Heumann's memoir Being Heumann, cowritten with Kristen Joiner. I'm unfamiliar with Kristen Joiner's work, but the writing style of the memoir made me think ghostwriter. The narrative voice was... well, the association in my head is "90s middle grade novel", but that might say more about me than it does about the authors. It's that in medias res, "Chapter One. Ring, ring! I awoke suddenly to the sound of the telephone. I started to get excited butterflies in my stomach. Who could be calling me at this time of night? I sat up in bed and reached for the receiver. It was 1991, and I was Claudia Kishi, secretary of the Baby-Sitters Club, and I had my own phone in my bedroom." kind of thing.
That said, nothing wrong with writing something in an easily accessible style so long as you're not leaving important parts out. Not knowing Judith Heumann's life well enough to know what I don't know, I can't speak to the facts, but I can say that the word "bullshit" appeared once in it, which wouldn't have happened in the aforementioned 90s middle grade novel. And she packed a solid amount of real, usable information about activism tactics and strategy, and real disability rights history and organising principles and also disability 101 in there, and with a minimum of inspirational glurge or undue optimism about the present political state of America (it was published in 2021, two years before her death.) It's simplistic but not trite.
Plus Judith Heumann did have a genuinely very eventful and interesting career.
Tech
I got my current self-hosting project working: I can now point my phone (or my laptop) at my RasPi and select a song from the disk attached to it and play that song through the phone or laptop's speakers. (The difficulty was that most of the guides I could find assumed I wanted to use my phone to control a RasPi with a speaker attached to it, so I could play music hosted somewhere other than on the RasPi.)
Weather
Wet and cold.
Cats
Dorian experimented with a salchow too, at least once. He also was kind enough to demonstrate for me today that he can reach the one remaining kitchen bench I thought he couldn't get up on. At least this way I know he can do that. Meanwhile, Ash has the salchow locked in, and is now innovating with other Birdie eradication methods, such as a crocodile death roll.
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