got shitcanned
2 June 2025 04:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
megastalinThe danger of pseudo-freelancing or false contracting (where you're essentially an employee but for reasons such as you being in Serbia and the company being a virtual Estonian entity, they can't/won't hire you directly) is that once you're sick, where any normal European person can take a 2 month sick leave and the employer can't do shit about it, is that you get to ask only for accommodations.
And when the owner/CEO/HR person has had enough of accommodating you, you're gone.
Because you really need to know, is that all these fancy content marketing, AI whatever, founder-led startups will not work with sick people. The moment you get any kind of serious affliction, you're out.
Chippenham folk Festival
1 June 2025 04:10 pmwatervoleJust back from several days a Chippenham Folk Festival. Shattered, but had a good time.
Two days before the festival, the lady who was to be calling the maypole and doing the children's morris had to go into hospital (she should be fine, nothing too serious).
So, I got asked to take it over at short notice.
Fortunately, the original musician was still able to make it, and proved to be the best person I've ever worked with for maypole. He never had to be asked to speed up or slow down, he automatically matched the best pace for the dancers and played a bar or two extra slowly when a small child needed to cross the dance set.
It was good, especially as having a lot of adults in the set allowed me to use a greater range of dances.
We did (my granddaughter and I) an entry for Southern Star Longsword in the annual Chippenham 'Stick and Bucket' competition. As Southern Star was founded because of a Discworld convention, we had to enter...
Only having two dancers present did not deter us in the least. We took spare swords and buckets and trained a scratch team. One of the team had a mere 10 mins practice before the performance!
Here's the performance - Southern Star are 5 mins into the video, but you can watch all the teams entering.
The man in the orangutan outfit is my husband, Richard. That's his collection costume for fesivals - he's a Pratchett fan as well...
Week in review: Week to 31 May
1 June 2025 04:13 pmpedantherI haven't been watching the just-finished season of Doctor Who, ( and I was rather put out this morning to be told, by someone who assumed I'd already seen it, how the season finale ends )
In more cheerful TV news, the current season of Taskmaster is very, very good.
At board game club, ( we played Risk Legacy and Century: Golem Edition )
( Computer games: Battletech, The Beekeeper's Picnic, Mark of the Ninja )
( Reading challenges )
( Podcast: The Hidden Almanac )
( I overslept and missed Parkrun )
I've discovered a new word for the list of Words I'd Only Ever Seen Written Down And Was Pronouncing Wrong All This Time. This one is a character name: Methos, a recurring character from the 1990s TV series Highlander. I've been reading about him sporadically for decades, but I've never actually seen an episode with him in, and when I went looking for Youtube clips of Peter Wingfield performances a few days ago I discovered that I've been mentally pronouncing the E wrong: I always figured the first syllable of his name rhymed with "death", but it turns out it rhymes with "teeth".
In more cheerful TV news, the current season of Taskmaster is very, very good.
At board game club, ( we played Risk Legacy and Century: Golem Edition )
( Computer games: Battletech, The Beekeeper's Picnic, Mark of the Ninja )
( Reading challenges )
( Podcast: The Hidden Almanac )
( I overslept and missed Parkrun )
I've discovered a new word for the list of Words I'd Only Ever Seen Written Down And Was Pronouncing Wrong All This Time. This one is a character name: Methos, a recurring character from the 1990s TV series Highlander. I've been reading about him sporadically for decades, but I've never actually seen an episode with him in, and when I went looking for Youtube clips of Peter Wingfield performances a few days ago I discovered that I've been mentally pronouncing the E wrong: I always figured the first syllable of his name rhymed with "death", but it turns out it rhymes with "teeth".
Fiction log - May 2025
1 June 2025 09:46 ampedantherFiction books
Andrei Baltakmens. A Hangman for Ghosts (e)
Eugene Byrne. Things Unborn
Diana Wynne Jones. House of Many Ways (re-read)
Diana Wynne Jones. Howl's Moving Castle (re-read)
In progress
Helen Simonson. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand (e)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, tr. Michael Guybon. The First Circle
Abandoned
CL Moore. Jirel of Joiry (e)
Non-fiction books
Xavier Duff. Noose: True Stories of Australians Who Died at the Gallows
In progress
Isaac Asimov. A Choice of Catastrophes
Abandoned
Raymond Lamont-Brown. John Brown: Queen Victoria's Highland Servant
( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )
Top of the to-read pile
Ursula K Le Guin. Always Coming Home (e)
Andrei Baltakmens. A Hangman for Ghosts (e)
Eugene Byrne. Things Unborn
Diana Wynne Jones. House of Many Ways (re-read)
Diana Wynne Jones. Howl's Moving Castle (re-read)
In progress
Helen Simonson. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand (e)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, tr. Michael Guybon. The First Circle
Abandoned
CL Moore. Jirel of Joiry (e)
Non-fiction books
Xavier Duff. Noose: True Stories of Australians Who Died at the Gallows
In progress
Isaac Asimov. A Choice of Catastrophes
Abandoned
Raymond Lamont-Brown. John Brown: Queen Victoria's Highland Servant
( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )
Top of the to-read pile
Ursula K Le Guin. Always Coming Home (e)
Nightmare
31 May 2025 07:58 ampedantherLast night I dreamed that I came here to update my blog, only to find that the site had been shut down without notice and all Dreamwidth addresses now redirected to an ecommerce site flogging garden supplies.
At the bottom of the site, in tiny print, was a link to an announcement unapologetically stating that the shareholders had deemed Dreamwidth uneconomical and talking around the fact that - as my dream-self recalled - there'd been another statement back when Dreamwidth was bought out where they promised that it would stay the same old Dreamwidth and there would be no big changes without community consultation.
(At least I can be confident that, in the waking world, the actual owners of Dreamwidth wouldn't pull anything like that on us.)
(Now, Tumblr, on the other hand...)
At the bottom of the site, in tiny print, was a link to an announcement unapologetically stating that the shareholders had deemed Dreamwidth uneconomical and talking around the fact that - as my dream-self recalled - there'd been another statement back when Dreamwidth was bought out where they promised that it would stay the same old Dreamwidth and there would be no big changes without community consultation.
(At least I can be confident that, in the waking world, the actual owners of Dreamwidth wouldn't pull anything like that on us.)
(Now, Tumblr, on the other hand...)
limits of psychiatry
26 May 2025 03:51 pmmegastalinI would really love to find a psychiatrist and/or psychologist who understands that mental health care is essentially lifelong palliative care and doesn't traffic in sugar and rainbows.
It's really the worst aspect of this day hospital thing. The forced nicety, the implication that some kind of a great comeback, some transformation is just around the corner if only we try hard enough if only we believe.
But that's not what's around the corner. Around the corner are new challenges at best and devastating crises at worst. Why pretend otherwise?
I firmly believe that once this civilisation returns to some form of rationality (which has, to put it lightly, fallen out of style worldwide) all of these therapeutic practices will be revised and most of them will cease to exist.
I keep looking at people here, they seem not all that responsive, kind of out of it. And I think to myself, surely they must have been admitted a few weeks before I did, this is the start of their treatment. But then the next day, I find out they've been here for 2 and half a months and are being released the next day!
They come in banged up, they leave banged up. The entire focus is on the process, not the outcome.
Psychiatry as it is now is like the astronomy of old before the heliocentric system. These astronomers, despite their fundamentally wrong model, were able to make accurate but limited predictions of the motions of the stars. So can psychiatry get the patient back from the ledge, with medication, with deep-sounding truisms (that don't stand up to further scrutiny) but can do little else in terms of elevating the patient's quality of life.
Why is this so? Because psychiatry is essentially solipsistic, it doesn't concern itself with the outside world, with social relations, or even the bare necessities of social life. No, as far as a psychiatrist is concerned, only you and your psyche exist. And once we get it somehow in order, while it being an open secret that we can't get it in order, something will mystically transform.
Eventually, soon, in a few centuries tops, this will be replaced with a kind of Marxist psychiatry that will center mental illness where it needs to be centered - in the society and group that generated the malady in the first place. It will be revealed that no mind or body is a wrong mind or body requiring medicalisation (in the broadest term, I don't mean just taking meds) but understanding and above all grace.
Until then, people like me, and there are so many of us, are left to contend with a system that we need to make us barely functional and alive, but that doesn't help otherwise and that's worse -- a system that is fundamentally violent and cruel and won't hesitate to punish you at a mere perception of being not quite contrite enough as you receive its ministrations.
It's really the worst aspect of this day hospital thing. The forced nicety, the implication that some kind of a great comeback, some transformation is just around the corner if only we try hard enough if only we believe.
But that's not what's around the corner. Around the corner are new challenges at best and devastating crises at worst. Why pretend otherwise?
I firmly believe that once this civilisation returns to some form of rationality (which has, to put it lightly, fallen out of style worldwide) all of these therapeutic practices will be revised and most of them will cease to exist.
I keep looking at people here, they seem not all that responsive, kind of out of it. And I think to myself, surely they must have been admitted a few weeks before I did, this is the start of their treatment. But then the next day, I find out they've been here for 2 and half a months and are being released the next day!
They come in banged up, they leave banged up. The entire focus is on the process, not the outcome.
Psychiatry as it is now is like the astronomy of old before the heliocentric system. These astronomers, despite their fundamentally wrong model, were able to make accurate but limited predictions of the motions of the stars. So can psychiatry get the patient back from the ledge, with medication, with deep-sounding truisms (that don't stand up to further scrutiny) but can do little else in terms of elevating the patient's quality of life.
Why is this so? Because psychiatry is essentially solipsistic, it doesn't concern itself with the outside world, with social relations, or even the bare necessities of social life. No, as far as a psychiatrist is concerned, only you and your psyche exist. And once we get it somehow in order, while it being an open secret that we can't get it in order, something will mystically transform.
Eventually, soon, in a few centuries tops, this will be replaced with a kind of Marxist psychiatry that will center mental illness where it needs to be centered - in the society and group that generated the malady in the first place. It will be revealed that no mind or body is a wrong mind or body requiring medicalisation (in the broadest term, I don't mean just taking meds) but understanding and above all grace.
Until then, people like me, and there are so many of us, are left to contend with a system that we need to make us barely functional and alive, but that doesn't help otherwise and that's worse -- a system that is fundamentally violent and cruel and won't hesitate to punish you at a mere perception of being not quite contrite enough as you receive its ministrations.
Week in review: Week to 24 May
25 May 2025 03:12 pmpedanther. Had a bit of a stressful week due to events ocurring with a committee I'm on. Did some things, didn't do some other things, spent a bunch of time worrying about whether I was doing enough or should be pushing myself to do more.
. One thing that helped counteract the stress was that this was also the week of the Howl's Moving Castle buddy read on StoryGraph, which lasted most of the week and offered something fun to keep my mind off things. At one point during the week, I found myself pondering a hypothetical cast for a TV adaptation, supposing there'd been one a few years after the book was published. The difficulty of such a hypothetical, of course, is that it wouldn't have had the budget for anyone really famous (the TV version of Archer's Goon didn't have anybody more famous than "played a villain in a middling Doctor Who story", though it had at least three of those). Or, at least, not anybody really famous now: if you timed it just right, you might be able to snag Catherine Zeta-Jones to play Miss Angorian before she got too famous and lit out for Hollywood. I didn't come to any conclusions about who might be good casting for Howell, largely because most of the Welsh actors I could think of would have been either too old or too young - I did notice that Peter Wingfield was in the right place at about the right age, and he's got a good face for it, but I still haven't actually got around to watching him in anything yet so I don't have an opinion on how well he'd do.
. At board game club, we played Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre. My opinion remains what it was last time I played it, which is that I find the game mechanically interesting, but I dislike the artwork and the attempts at humour. We also played Flip 7, an abstract push-your-luck game; I did pretty well, but there were too many rounds where I pushed my luck one step too far and lost everything. I'd play it again.
. A few weeks ago, I was in the audience for the recording of an episode of a podcast game show called Inestimable, in which contestants are forced to guess at the answers to questions like "How many basketballs fit in an Olympic swimming pool" and "How many people were stabbed in the entire run of Columbo", and the audience members also put in guesses which are averaged or aggregated to get a collective guess which is put up against the contestants'. That episode has now been released.
. One thing that helped counteract the stress was that this was also the week of the Howl's Moving Castle buddy read on StoryGraph, which lasted most of the week and offered something fun to keep my mind off things. At one point during the week, I found myself pondering a hypothetical cast for a TV adaptation, supposing there'd been one a few years after the book was published. The difficulty of such a hypothetical, of course, is that it wouldn't have had the budget for anyone really famous (the TV version of Archer's Goon didn't have anybody more famous than "played a villain in a middling Doctor Who story", though it had at least three of those). Or, at least, not anybody really famous now: if you timed it just right, you might be able to snag Catherine Zeta-Jones to play Miss Angorian before she got too famous and lit out for Hollywood. I didn't come to any conclusions about who might be good casting for Howell, largely because most of the Welsh actors I could think of would have been either too old or too young - I did notice that Peter Wingfield was in the right place at about the right age, and he's got a good face for it, but I still haven't actually got around to watching him in anything yet so I don't have an opinion on how well he'd do.
. At board game club, we played Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre. My opinion remains what it was last time I played it, which is that I find the game mechanically interesting, but I dislike the artwork and the attempts at humour. We also played Flip 7, an abstract push-your-luck game; I did pretty well, but there were too many rounds where I pushed my luck one step too far and lost everything. I'd play it again.
. A few weeks ago, I was in the audience for the recording of an episode of a podcast game show called Inestimable, in which contestants are forced to guess at the answers to questions like "How many basketballs fit in an Olympic swimming pool" and "How many people were stabbed in the entire run of Columbo", and the audience members also put in guesses which are averaged or aggregated to get a collective guess which is put up against the contestants'. That episode has now been released.
Book Chain, weeks 10 & 11
25 May 2025 03:05 pmpedanther#14: Read a book with something on the cover that was also on the previous book’s cover.
Noose: True Stories of Australians Who Have Died at the Gallows by Xavier Duff. The subtitle is kind of inaccurate: many of the chapters are stories of crimes that led to someone dying at the gallows, but while the crimes can be recounted in detail, for most of them the historical record lacks the details that would allow the story of the person to be told. I didn't enjoy it, and I didn't feel like I was learning much that was new. (At least in the sense that everything it talked about was something I was aware of in general terms as a kind of thing that happened, though I admit that many of the details were new.) (And unpleasant.) I don't know if it's really the book's fault; it may largely be just that true crime isn't really my idea of fun reading.
#15: Read a book that has a spine that's a different colour from the previous book.
Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. It was long overdue for a re-read, and I got a nudge from somebody I know organising a buddy read on StoryGraph. It's just as good as I remember, and a nice relief from all the darker books that I've been reading lately.
#16: Read a book that was published in a different decade than the previous book.
I decided to keep the Diana Wynne Jones train rolling and read House of Many Ways, a sequel to Howl's Moving Castle that was published a couple of decades later, and which I'd only read once, back when it first came out. (There's another sequel in between, but I have re-read that one before, and there were bits of it that I wasn't in the mood to revisit.) I don't love House of Many Ways as much as Howl's Moving Castle - it's less... I think maybe "ambitious" is the word I'm after? - but it's a fun read.
Noose: True Stories of Australians Who Have Died at the Gallows by Xavier Duff. The subtitle is kind of inaccurate: many of the chapters are stories of crimes that led to someone dying at the gallows, but while the crimes can be recounted in detail, for most of them the historical record lacks the details that would allow the story of the person to be told. I didn't enjoy it, and I didn't feel like I was learning much that was new. (At least in the sense that everything it talked about was something I was aware of in general terms as a kind of thing that happened, though I admit that many of the details were new.) (And unpleasant.) I don't know if it's really the book's fault; it may largely be just that true crime isn't really my idea of fun reading.
#15: Read a book that has a spine that's a different colour from the previous book.
Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. It was long overdue for a re-read, and I got a nudge from somebody I know organising a buddy read on StoryGraph. It's just as good as I remember, and a nice relief from all the darker books that I've been reading lately.
#16: Read a book that was published in a different decade than the previous book.
I decided to keep the Diana Wynne Jones train rolling and read House of Many Ways, a sequel to Howl's Moving Castle that was published a couple of decades later, and which I'd only read once, back when it first came out. (There's another sequel in between, but I have re-read that one before, and there were bits of it that I wasn't in the mood to revisit.) I don't love House of Many Ways as much as Howl's Moving Castle - it's less... I think maybe "ambitious" is the word I'm after? - but it's a fun read.
The Final Reckoning
25 May 2025 02:55 pmpedantherThe thing I want to make clear first of all about Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part 2: The Final Reckoning is that I don't regret taking three hours out of my limited time upon this earth to watch it, and not only because if I hadn't I'd have always wondered what I'd missed. That said, there was quite a lot of it where I was attending politely rather than being properly engaged and excited; there are large chunks that are unusually slow and sombre for a M:I movie, and when it did come to the energetic nonsense the series does so well, I think they finally managed to find a level of nonsense that my suspension of disbelief was unable to rise to. (It wasn't the handwaving around the computer stuff that did it, because I'd accepted that as part of the price of admission; I think it was the part where Ethan [redacted] and [redacted], only to [redacted].)
Part of the reason for the tonal weirdness is that, while this isn't the first Mission: Impossible movie to posit that if the team fails in their impossible mission it will mean the end of the world as we know it, this one really leans into it. Possibly because metatextually it does mark the end of something: if you come out of the movie not aware that it's Tom Cruise's swan song in the role, it won't be for lack of the movie telling you about it. There are a lot of scenes of people sombrely pondering the imminent end of the world, and the nature of the legacy they'll leave behind them, with loud sombre music to tell you how to feel about it. There are also a lot of call-backs to Ethan's earlier adventures, some of which are fun and some of which are annoying and some of which just are.
It doesn't help that for a large chunk of the movie there's no real antagonist to bounce off. I've always thought that an omniscient faceless AI was an odd choice of opponent for a series where the heroes' stock in trade leaned heavily on mind games and disguises, but in Part 1, the AI was at least willing to adopt disguises and play mind games back at them, and its human sidekick Gabriel filled the antagonist role most of the time anyway. In The Final Reckoning Gabriel is sidelined for a long stretch of the movie and the AI ascends to the level of impersonal force of nature, like the frigid Arctic ocean that is the closest thing to an opponent in one of the movie's key action sequences.
It's not all negatives; I like the IMF team that gets assembled, and the way they interact with each other, and wouldn't mind seeing more of them in the post-Ethan movie that this movie is pretty clearly holding a door open for. The ending is about as close to a good old "they defeat the villain while letting him think he's winning" sting as you can get with a faceless near-omniscient AI as the villain.
It may even be that there's about as much good stuff in this movie as in any given two-hour adventure movie, it's just that at three hours of runtime it's more diluted than usual. (Proposals for how to trim an hour out of the movie are already circulating on the internet, naturally.) Differing opinions are differing about whether the good outweighs the less-good; for myself, I refer you to my opening statement.
Part of the reason for the tonal weirdness is that, while this isn't the first Mission: Impossible movie to posit that if the team fails in their impossible mission it will mean the end of the world as we know it, this one really leans into it. Possibly because metatextually it does mark the end of something: if you come out of the movie not aware that it's Tom Cruise's swan song in the role, it won't be for lack of the movie telling you about it. There are a lot of scenes of people sombrely pondering the imminent end of the world, and the nature of the legacy they'll leave behind them, with loud sombre music to tell you how to feel about it. There are also a lot of call-backs to Ethan's earlier adventures, some of which are fun and some of which are annoying and some of which just are.
It doesn't help that for a large chunk of the movie there's no real antagonist to bounce off. I've always thought that an omniscient faceless AI was an odd choice of opponent for a series where the heroes' stock in trade leaned heavily on mind games and disguises, but in Part 1, the AI was at least willing to adopt disguises and play mind games back at them, and its human sidekick Gabriel filled the antagonist role most of the time anyway. In The Final Reckoning Gabriel is sidelined for a long stretch of the movie and the AI ascends to the level of impersonal force of nature, like the frigid Arctic ocean that is the closest thing to an opponent in one of the movie's key action sequences.
It's not all negatives; I like the IMF team that gets assembled, and the way they interact with each other, and wouldn't mind seeing more of them in the post-Ethan movie that this movie is pretty clearly holding a door open for. The ending is about as close to a good old "they defeat the villain while letting him think he's winning" sting as you can get with a faceless near-omniscient AI as the villain.
It may even be that there's about as much good stuff in this movie as in any given two-hour adventure movie, it's just that at three hours of runtime it's more diluted than usual. (Proposals for how to trim an hour out of the movie are already circulating on the internet, naturally.) Differing opinions are differing about whether the good outweighs the less-good; for myself, I refer you to my opening statement.