Bundle of Holding: Weird Wizard
Sep. 22nd, 2025 01:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

The SHADOW OF THE WEIRD WIZARD corebooks, supplements, and adventures.
Bundle of Holding: Weird Wizard
Which 2015 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
18 (66.7%)
Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson
7 (25.9%)
Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta
5 (18.5%)
The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
3 (11.1%)
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
11 (40.7%)
The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey
11 (40.7%)
[... sorry about the template, I hit return in the title field and IT POSTED. details to appear shortly. :-p]
Reading. ( Ann Leckie, Monty Lyman, Ronald Melzack & Patrick D. Wall )
Writing. ... I have actually put some more notes into The Document.
So many lost property e-mails. (And at some point I'm going to need to start replying to them, too.)
Watching. On YouTube: True Facts: Bats, The Science Of The Hunt. NSFW. Definitely... An Experience.
Cooking. ... yeah no I managed to make veg spag bol on Friday but otherwise we've mostly just been feeling faintly sorry for ourselves. Okay, no, that's not quite true, I did also achieve baked potato on Wednesday.
Eating. Misc takeaway from The Field (leftover Sunday night curry for dinner on Tuesday; leftover vegetable fried rice + Szechuan tofu for breakfast on same...). I remain mildly resentful that the Wagamama menu still does not contain any of My Favourites.
Growing. The second attempt at pineapple has NEW LEAVES. The second attempt at lemongrass is maybe Going? And other than that I have no idea because I have spectacularly failed to make it to the plot this week.
Observing. BATS. A variety of excellent dahlias and passion flowers on a Trip To Town (post office, pharmacy).
Which of these look interesting?
Yalum by Matthew Hughes (September 2025)
10 (27.0%)
Some other option (see comments)
1 (2.7%)
Cats!
35 (94.6%)
... and doesn't quite make it.
On page 187 (of 218), we finally get this paragraph:
At this point we need to return to a crucial caveat. In most cases of persistent pain, whatever caused the initial injury has healed. Pain is now the primary disease. But there are a number of cases where there is continual damage that triggers nociceptive fibres; chronic inflammatory diseases are good examples. It is also important to point out that not every case of back pain is our brain's overreaction. A small -- but important -- minority of cases are caused by serious conditions -- cancer, some infections, spinal fractures and the nerve-compressing cauda equina syndrome -- but these can usually be ruled out by doctors, who will be on the lookout for 'red flag' symptoms. However, in the majority of cases of persistent pain (and over 90% of cases of back pain), there is no longer any identifiable tissue damage; our brain has become hypersensitive.
In a book that otherwise dedicates a lot of time to talking about gender and racial inequalities in healthcare access, including a solid half-paragraph on how common and how painful endometriosis (a chronic inflammatory condition!) is, the bit where "well this only applies to most people..." gets breezed past is certainly causing me more feelings. And yet it's still the closest anything I've read so far actually gets to engaging with the fact that the rest of us exist, so... no get-out-of-writing-essays-free card for me here, alas.
(The Painful Truth, Monty Lyman, mostly pretty good and definitely got me to think constructively about a few things -- like the merits of classical vs contemporary Pilates for my specific usecase via discussion of knitting -- and introduced me to some more, like open-label placebos and "safe threats" and the impact of paracetamol on empathy. It's incomplete, but not disrecommended.)
A little while ago the toddler's household told me that you could turn the top of a pineapple into a whole entire pineapple plant (with the caveat that at least 60% of the time it goes mouldy). My first attempt at this had got as far as growing a whole entire root network but then suffered a Tragic Incident from which it never recovered; the second had been sat around with partially-browned but no-longer-becoming-more-browned and definitely-still-partially-green leaves for Quite Some Time. I had more or less hit the point of "... is this actually doing anything? at all?" and then upon my return from the most recent round of Adventures I rotated it in service of watering it, to discover...
... that it's growing a WHOLE NEW SET OF LEAVES. Look at it go! I am very excited!
(My understanding is that if I manage to keep it alive that long it'll take somewhere in the region of 3 years to fruit, and then in the fashion of all bromeliads will die having produced said single fruit. Happily this is about the rate at which we eat fresh pineapple...)
Or rather the text message to book my covid & flu vaccinations. "For 75+ and immunosuppressed". I just double-checked and "have had a blood cancer" is still top of the NHS list of qualifying conditions, so that's my armour when the GP surgery gatekeepers are like, you're too young and you might be DEPRIVING someone of this vaccine who NEEDS it. (This has been the conversation the last three times I got invited to get vaccinated, sigh, and then they get a manager to look at my medical record, and then they grudgingly admit that maybe I can has jabs.)
Date is the Saturday when all the Cambridge undergraduates arrive, so just in time. I'll mostly be avoiding students for the first couple weeks of term to let the freshers flu play out, but I will be playing ice hockey so not entirely. Also getting in and out of the city centre that day may be entertaining, probably best done on foot.
Have spent most of the day asleep.