Jules Jones's Blog, page 4

2021

 I should have written a 2021 retrospective post at the beginning of January. I did in fact mean to do it, but forgot. How unusual.  2021. Year two of a vicious pandemic that had killed over 150,000 of my fellow citizens in total by the end of the year, and yet some of my fellow citizens are still engaging in magical thinking and refusing to entertain the concept that there is something lethal out there that could get them, yes, them, too. Some of them are occasionally on the same bus as me. :-/  I've been vaccinated and boostered. I didn't get symptoms, and avoided getting pinged by the app until nearly the end of the year, and then got pinged twice within about a month, but did my daily testing for a week and tested negative all the way through. I presume I haven't had it yet. I hope not. One of my colleagues has long Covid, and it was obvious to me that there was something wrong even before he told me what it was, because I've known him a long time and I know from personal experience what it feels like to be exhausted and in pain all the time. I achieved not going to A&E all year, which is a pleasant change. My chronic migraine has slowly improved to the point where I can often go all week without anything more than being a bit tired and the occasional brief dysphasia blip as long as I'm careful about managing triggers and remember to take my meds. Still not up to writing on top of a full time job, but given how little money there is in it if you can't make it a full time job, I'm not missing out on any secondary income stream. I just feel guilty about not completing the short story sequence I'd partly written for NineStar Press when my brain shut down. The ancient and venerable database at work was finally replaced with its New!Exciting!Modern! replacement that's been coming next autumn for the last three years. Replacement is sucky in interestingly different ways. It is compatible with Windows 10/Office 365, unlike A&V which after the change to Win10 had to be nurse-maided and kept crashing with data loss. However, there is no way to collapse a record display into a summary that is easy to scan down and find and open just the bit you want. You have to read though all the many, many bits of information to try to find the one you want, and it's very easy to lose track. It doesn't lose data when it crashes, and it doesn't so much crash as refuse to talk to the outside world occasionally, but that is about all that can be said in its favour when compared to A&V. I had some things happen that I could have done without happening, most of which are in locked posts, and most of which are more or less fixable. The one that wasn't was the sudden death of Pol, a friend I've known from Pratchett fandom for over twenty years. I'm still having the occasional "not going to do in-person Eastercon this year, won't get to see my friends for another year...oh" moment. So not a great year, all in all, but there were a few better things than 2020, which is not saying a lot.

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book sale

 Book sale! Smashwords are running a promotion, so my self-published reprint ebooks are 75% off or free there until the end of New Year's Day. I've also reduced the prices by the same amount everywhere else except Amazon, because Amazon won't let me sell for under 99c. Prices in US$ are as follows: Smashwords - apparently the retail price is the same in the catalogue itself but the discount shows up in the basket. If not, ask me and I'll generate a coupon code. Lots of other authors are also in the sale. Dolphin Dreams is $1.24, Lord and Master 1 is 99c, and the others are free.  Everwhere else except Amazon, same as Smashwords. At Amazon they're 99c each. Important - this does not include my books published by someone else, and it doesn't include the print books (which are already nearly at the minimum Amazon allows). This Books2Read link will take you to a page where you you'll find links to lots of places where you can buy the books. https://books2read.com/rl/WpYnqG (Some of those are affiliate links.) My SmashWords profile is at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/JulesJonesWriter?ref=JulesJonesWriter and on Amazon it's https://amzn.to/33R9Crz

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a somewhat belated Merry Christmas

 I have had an overly exciting week and did not reach "say Merry Christmas to DreamWidth" on my To Do List. :-) Off now to do some even more urgent things that did not happen on the day...

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Happy Gauda Prime Day!

It's forty years tonight since Blake's 7 fans got an early Christmas present...

I and many of my friends can remember *exactly* what we were doing in the early evening 40 years ago today. :-) Thank you, Chris Boucher, for one of the most memorable pieces of television ever shown in the UK. 

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Windows 11

 So this weekend my computer offered to upgrade itself to Windows 11. I let it go ahead, because there shouldn't be anything left on my current laptop that requires much swearing and effort to get to work with newer iterations (the shift from XP to 8 was... interesting).

Not entirely convinced so far. Some of this is just a matter of getting used to it, but so far there's one change that is seriously annoying. I'm used to right-clicking on the tool bar to get a menu that allows me to go to the desktop with one more click. That doesn't work any more. Off to Edge to find out how to fix this. It turns out that one is now expected to use a tiny bit of tool bar at the far right. Yes, it may be a single click rather than two. It's also a lot harder to hit with the mouse, at least if you have flaky hands.

Don't like the new start menu, since it's lost the ability to put shortcuts into named groups. I found that extremely useful, and am sad to see it go, but at least the "you will lose this facility" list before you click "accept" warned about this. I've gone and deleted various apps that I Do Not Want. I am an Old and do not want TikTok, FaceBook, and Instagram. I've deleted Amazon Prime, mostly to avoid temptation, and Disney because I'm not likely to want it, even if it isn't on the "fire and sword" list.

I expect it will have found new and exciting ways to annoy me, because it's Windows. But so far it doesn't seem to have broken anything badly.

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Booster done

 Had my Covid booster on Thursday - Pfizer for me, which is what I had for the original two jabs. I was a bit wobbly afterwards, but um, yes, needle phobic... My arm was tender for a couple of days, started improving yesterday, and this morning I can tell I've had a jab but it's almost gone. I did feel a little cold a couple of times, and there was an episode where I suddenly became very tired over the course of two or three minutes, but in general it's been a typical post-vaccine feeling a little washed out if I thought about it. I could have gone to work if I'd had to, although I'd booked a couple of days leave just in case. Biggest problem for me is that any tenderness and swelling in that area always aggravates my RSI, which is the actual reason I'm glad I wasn't going in to work. That lymph node has come up again, even if not as enthusiastically as the first time, so presumably that's going to be an ongoing feature of this vaccine.

Overall, I've felt a lot worse after a bad session at the dentist. This is not a flippant comparison; I often have to sit in the waiting room for half an hour to an hour afterwards because a full dose of anaesthetic can make me very wobbly.

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Book review: Jay Hulme -The Backwater Sermons

I first discovered Jay Hulme's writing through his Twitter threads detailing his love of church architecture. He would tell the story of his visit to a church, using beautiful language and beautiful photography - small churches, large churches, obscure ones, world-famous ones. He pointed out tiny details and explored some areas that are normally not accessible to the public. He is a professional poet, and that shone through. When he started his exploration of church buildings, he was an atheist. More than that, as a young trans man he didn't feel that there was a place for him in a church as a member rather than engaging with a love affair with the building. That changed one day. He realised that somewhere along the way he had started believing, and that there were churches and ministers and congregations that did not think he was too queer, too poor, too odd, for a place with them. I followed his Twitter feed for the church porn. The queer Christian poetry that started appearing some months later was an unexpected joy. Having found faith, he started exploring it - a few months before Covid changed the world. The result was queer Christian poetry that spoke of believing in the time of plague, in a time when churches were closed for the safety of all. But God isn't confined to stone and brick. Jay's poetry is a stunningly beautiful reminder of that. Now the poems have been collected into a book. I'm straight and cis and still it speaks to me about God, so intensely that I cannot manage more than three or four poems at a time without weeping. There are poems about God being everywhere you need to find Them, from garden to nightclub to a late-night taxi. There are love letters to cathedrals, including my own dearest love, Durham. There is sadness and joy. There is affirmation that God loves all that She has made, not just those people who came out of the mould He picks up most often. There is a joke that had me laughing out loud. There are questions and occasional answers about "God, why?" I don't understand all of these poems. I may never understand some. But I feel all of them, every single one. I love this book.  Publisher's website: https://canterburypress.hymnsam.co.uk/books/9781786223937/the-backwater-sermonsOther shops: https://books2read.com/u/b5oVgO

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Book review: Allie Brosh, 1) Hyperbole and a Half, 2) Solutions and Other Problems.

Allie Brosh has written two books (so far), which I'm reviewing together. I love them. They're somewhat hyperbolic versions of stories originating from her real life, told in the form of comics. Most of them are funny, some of them are not, and a few give a deep insight into the mechanisms of a mind grappling with nightmares.

Allie Brosh - Hyperbole and a Half

( Read more... )

Allie Brosh - Solutions and other problems

( Read more... )

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And flu shot done

Got this year's flu shot done on Thursday. I've been having it for the last 20 years, so until this year I was on a 56k modem that needed a landline, just with the occasional refresh of the wiring to make sure it was still working. I'm still getting it as a belt and braces thing alongside this year's shiny new 4G but I can't want to get my next armful of mRNA and my update from the 4G model to 5G.

The healthcare assistant said the jab hadn't been as bad for her this year, and I'm finding the same. I always get a tender arm and tiredness for a few days afterwards, but while I can tell that I've had a jab it's quite a bit less tender than usual. Still glad I had yesterday off, though - as usual, I  could have dragged myself into work, but would have preferred not to. But even in the Before Time - I often had flu in years when I hadn't been vaccinated, and flu is not just a bad cold. There was the year I had flu three times (there's a reason why the jab has 3 or 4 strains in it), there was the year it took everyone at work weeks to recover and it was often followed by an opportunistic bacterial infection, there was the year I nearly couldn't get on a plane to make it home to see a dying family member, and I'll take the tender arm and tiredness for a few days, thank you very much.

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Still here

 So once again not only have I not written anything here for months, I have not read anything here for at least two weeks. It is perhaps a measure of my life that I can measure how long it's been since I last read my DreamWidth feed by the last Oglaf comic I remember having already seen.

There are various and sundry reasons for this, not least the ever-present medical issues that mean work generally occupies almost all of my capacity for staring at a full size screen. I realised last month that one of the reasons I'd fallen so badly behind on my email was that I used to skim it for triage on the bus, which I have not done since the free WiFi on the bus went away. I have therefore finally given in and bought a data plan, only 7 years after getting a smartphone. Only one month for the moment just to see how much I use. The answer to this appears to be "not much because I have forgotten about the concept of getting my portable internet out while I'm on the bus". I have actually bought a data block a couple of times in the past, but that was for special occasions, usually of the unpleasant kind. Sadly, one of them was the aftermath of a terrorist attack, when I thought it might be a good idea to have internet available while I was on the move. I never used it, and was very glad not to have occasion to.

What I've been doing on the bus instead during the last year is reading work-safe blogs, because I also have a work phone and if I'm required to carry the wretched thing around with me I'm going to use the corporate data plan. (In theory I have a Kobo; in practice it's not getting used very much.) Alas, DreamWidth is not terribly mobile-friendly, and even if it was I'm not putting any of my personal stuff anywhere near the corporate data plan ever. My employer does not need to know my taste in porn, and does not need to know my passwords, and (rightfully) has access to anything I do on corporate systems. It's very unlikely anyone would actually want to do so, but do not put anything on there that you wouldn't want to be read out in court.

I've got three books to log sitting on my desk, along with four balls of yarn to be photographed and logged on Seizures-R-Us. Since they've been sitting there for over a month, good luck with that.

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