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 […]
A couple months ago, I noticed that for the past six years, a big part of my WordPress website (the section labeled “Hodgepodge”) had consisted of a placeholder page containing a paragraph of lorem ipsum text. Ever since then, I’ve been transferring everything over from my old static pages to WordPress. I’ve now finished doing […]
Disclaimer: I’m not involved with this year’s Hugo Awards or Packet, and I don’t know anything about what’s going on behind the scenes; I’m just a Worldcon member who wants to read the works in the Packet. Part of the Hugo Packet is now available, for members of this year’s Worldcon. (If you’re not a […]
Today would have been my mother’s 80th birthday. I can’t really imagine her at 80—she died at age 37. What would she have been like if she’d had another 43 years? I can make guesses—I imagine that, like many other people, she would have stayed fundamentally herself, while still growing and changing over time—but still, […]
During the final episode of season 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Kam made a joke that I really enjoyed. So I’ll tell you about it below, but it requires a little context for setup, and the context involves spoilers for the final two episodes of the season, “Subspace Rhapsody” and “Hegemony.” So I’ll […]
I’ve been doing a bunch of stuff lately, but haven’t been posting much about current status of most of it. Figured it was time to post an update. (I’m not looking for advice about any of this.) Unread-books project I’m down to only 200 unread trade paperbacks and hardcovers! I continue to expect that I’ll […]
Neil Clarke addresses the idea that “Only writers subscribe to genre magazines.” I want to add some thoughts of my own: The community has been having this argument since at least the early 2000s, maybe longer. We occasionally worried about it when I was a Strange Horizons editor—we wondered whether most of our readers were […]
I recently finished watching the 6-episode MCU Secret Invasion miniseries. I found it very disappointing. Unlike some people I’ve seen talking about the show, I don’t see this show as evidence that Marvel has gone irredeemably downhill, or that all MCU TV is terrible. I’ve at least somewhat liked all of the other Disney+ MCU […]
I’m going through Rise Again, the sequel to Rise Up Singing, and in the “Ballads & Old Songs” section I came across a song I was unfamiliar with. The first line goes: One man shall mow my meadow …so I assumed it was going to be one of those old bawdy-euphemism songs. But then the […]