Jane the Virgin was one of my favorite TV shows. But in mid-2018, in season 4, there was a storyline that I found hard to watch. I thought that storyline had ended, but I was still a little tense about the show, so I paused for a while between episodes—and somehow didn’t pick it up […]
One of the issues that I have with playing some of the songs in Rise Up Singing on guitar is that I feel like the chords are often written for someone with a slightly higher voice than mine. (My vocal range is mostly somewhere in the bass/baritone area; a voice teacher once told me that […]
Update: This issue has been more or less resolved; it turns out that the images in question had CMYK color profiles attached rather than RGB color profiles, so Apple software was (possibly correctly) displaying them in a way that the designer hadn’t intended. Leaving the post in place for historical purposes. The other night, I […]
“A Nebraska mother who helped her teenage daughter obtain abortion pills to end her pregnancy [at 29 weeks] and later disposed of the fetus’ remains was sentenced to two years in prison on Friday” (Quoted from a Forbes article.) This situation has apparently been in the news for over a year now, but I hadn’t […]
In early 2022, Jason Sanford published the results of his survey about genre magazines. I found the last two sections of the summary especially interesting: freeform responses to the questions “What could genre magazines and podcasts do to make you financially support them?” and “Any closing thoughts you'd like to share about SF/F magazines?” Some […]
Recent spam subject line: “10 Reasons Why Your Dog Ignores Your Commands” I didn’t read the email, but here’s what I assume it said: You don’t have a dog. Your commands are illegal, and your dog knows not to obey illegal commands. Your dog is an anarchist, and doesn’t believe in hierarchies. Your dog just […]
I watched the movie Red, White & Royal Blue last night, and enjoyed it a lot. It’s a romcom. Sweet and funny and a bit larger-than-life, with no particular uncertainty about how it’s going to turn out. But I enjoy that sort of thing when it’s done well, as it is here. (Content warning for […]
Yesterday, on the way to see a friend, I saw a sign that said “Peaches” and a couple of other kinds of fruit; clearly a fruit stand. So on the way home, I stopped there. A long narrow driveway led past rows of trees; at the end of the driveway, there were a couple of […]
Here’s an update on my hearing-aid insurance situation. Short version: It turns out that my insurance fully covers the expensive hearing aids that I want to get (yay!), so my last couple days of intermittently fretting about this were unnecessary. (As usual, of course, this situation underscores some of the problems with our healthcare system. […]
There’s an extremely common telephone situation that I feel like we ought to have a technological solution for by now: A customer and a customer service agent are talking on the phone together. Then something goes wrong, and the call gets disconnected. (This can happen for any of half a dozen reasons, most especially when […]
The other day, Simply Piano added a chords-only version of Maroon 5’s song “Memories.” So I played the chords along with their recording of the song, and something sounded really familiar about that sequence of chords. I thought about it for a while, and hummed it, and then realized: it’s the same chord progression as […]
Short version: I had a hearing test and a hearing-aid consultation yesterday; they both went fine; I hope to be getting hearing aids in November. My overall impression is that the process of getting hearing aids is (a) super slow, (b) super expensive, and (c) hard to get information about. At least at PAMF. Long […]