403: forbidden

Name change, health insurance, SNAFU

2024-03-08T23:07:51Z

I currently purchase health insurance through a state exchange. Updating my name with the exchange was a prerequisite for updating it with the insurer, so I did that back in January. It was supposed to propagate through, since both entities have my assigned-at-birth government ID number and presumably index off of that. Instead, my contract seems to have experienced a critical failure to exist. Since I was using auto-pay, I didn't immediately notice that they hadn't billed me for February. It was only yesterday, when I tried to refill my primary narcolepsy medication, that I found out I was uninsured.

By this morning, I'd pulled together enough information to get them to open a ticket for reinstatement. Clock is ticking on my remaining medication.

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Well, that's encouraging. (It really, really isn't.)

2024-03-07T21:35:04Z

When dignitaries of an uninvolved country visit a war zone, standard practice is to give all combatant governments a heads-up so that they know not to attack the area where the foreign VIP is about to go. Yesterday, Ukrainian president Zelensky was showing Greek PM Mitsotakis around the port facilities in Odessa when a missile launched out of Crimea struck "less than 500m" from the delegation. If that was a genuine accident, it's a staggering failure of Russian military command & control. If it was intentional, then they're playing fast & loose with the escalation ladder. Neither is exactly reassuring.

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Inflation incoming, with a bit of an explanatory chain

2024-01-06T02:47:38Z

One of my discoveries in 2023 is that podcasts and low-visual-impact videos do have a niche in my life after all. So I've started listening to a bunch of "professor's side gig/hobby project" things when I'm doing other boring tasks. I'd still much rather read, but for stuff I don't need to remember in great detail, audio is good enough.

One of those academic's side projects is "What's Going On With Shipping", and right now, that's A Lot. Back in November, a group called the Houthi (the Iran-backed faction in the Yemeni civil war) declared they would blockade the narrows between the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea against any commercial vessel "connected to Israel", and backed it up by seizing the Ray Shipping vessel Galaxy Leader, of which one of the beneficial owners is an Israeli. (Galaxy Leader's crew are still being held hostage.) So far, the targets have gone out to at least three degrees of separation in terms of who does business with / is owned by whom. Or the Houthi's intelligence gathering could just be shit. Not mutually exclusive.

The above has made not just the shipping companies themselves but also the providers of war risk insurance very skittish. So the big container ships, with their massive cargo value and associated cost to insure, have been diverting away from the Red Sea <-> Suez Canal <-> Mediterranean Sea section of route. Combine that with a drought throttling the Panama Canal (which is currently allowing 24 of the normal 38 ships per day to pass through) and moving cargo between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans is becoming a right pain in the ass. Slower, more expensive, and since part of the change is sudden, also disruptive to supply chains.

Those costs in shipping, insurance, and manufacturing delays are all passed on to us, the consumers. Prices go up, available product goes down, everything goes 'round and 'round.

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Current events, Iceland edition

2023-12-19T02:10:23Z

Over the past month or so I've been watching an assortment of geology professors use the ongoing subsurface magma activity around Grindavík, Iceland, as a hook for talking about volcanism in general. Today, a fissure finally popped open.

Live from Iceland has some cameras scattered around the area. This one has the best view. (Note that someone is actively managing the cameras, so they'll zoom and pan from time to time.) I've got the feed set to full screen on my laptop because it's just so pretty.

tl;dr: Lava! Get it while it's hot!

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The Onion wouldn't dare touch this one. Why? Because it's real.

2023-12-08T17:42:42Z

( Current events: The ADL as a reactionary organization... at best. )

Irony is truly dead, and we have killed it.

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Huh. We now know what makes eczema itchy.

2023-11-22T21:19:11Z

The Guardian reports that Staphylococcus aureus, already associated with and predispositive towards eczema development, makes a protein that interacts directly with the nerves that produce/transmit itching sensations.

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Legal name change, check

2023-10-24T04:56:37Z

For the longest time, I've disliked the way that I was given a wallet name that makes two distinct references to Christianity. Both of them appear to have been for reasons of inheritance rather than parental convictions, but I've never belonged to that religion and being named in connection with it sends entirely the wrong signal. Even if today one of those references is only apparent when you examine the name's Gaelic roots, I knew and it bothered me. For that and a variety of other reasons, a name change has been on my extended to-do list for well over a decade.

So after being told on my latest visit to the UK, this past February, that I need a fresh passport photo for any subsequent visits, I decided that this year was The Time. After an extended anxiety stall, this morning a dear friend accompanied me to the nearest county courthouse. I spent much longer standing in line than in the actual courtroom, which is typical. (N.B.: Civil matters are apparently never shown on digital schedules here in King County, be they online or on the building's own public screens. It's done to safeguard the identities of people seeking protection orders, by both not directly identifying them and not specifically failing to identify them.) And then I emerged with a brand shiny new wallet-name, went home, and fell over to get the sleep I'd been too wired for last night.

Next step, make an appointment with the licensing dpt. to get my new name into my actual wallet. Once that's done, I'll have adequate ID to send my passport off for replacement. Also need to contact my bank, health insurance, renter's insurance, landlord, etc. It's all going to be a short-term pain in the neck, but also a long-term relief.

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Heads up: NC Pfizer plant knocked out by a tornado

2023-07-19T23:14:53Z

Damage is still being assessed, but according to Bloomberg, that location handles “a quarter of all sterile injectables used in US hospitals“ (paywall breaker). I hope that’s a bad wording of ‘1/4 of Pfizer’s hospital-bound injectable products in the U.S.’, but either way, it’s bad.

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Seriously, humans? Seriously?

2023-03-13T05:02:28Z

TIL: The international moratorium on commercial whaling is only about as old as I am. The linked article is an interesting description of that slice of history, with application to transitioning away from petroleum as the world previously transitioned away from whale blubber.

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Perils of being a strongly Nth-gender enby

2023-03-11T10:50:27Z

I was expecting this to happen eventually, but not soon.

I spent February in the UK with my sweetheart. ~80% positive experience even though I spent most of it either sick or grotty from asthma. It also served as early warning to update my passport (3yrs early), when the border guard got a colleague to double check that my face matched my photo ID.

At the same time, my interactions with officials on both sides of the international border—as well as occasional service professionals across the pond—were uncomfortably gendered. There wasn't any moment of hesitation to select a pronoun or honorific, as people had towards me in many U.S. contexts since the post-COVID reopening. It's about as dysphoria-inducing as being consistently "ma'm"d when other's default perceptions of me were feminine.

I still feel vastly better with my sex hormones balanced towards testosterone, but damn if I like the side effects.

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Let me run a hypothesis by you, folks.

2022-11-14T02:04:15Z

If you want to get rid of something and have it stay gone, it helps to have some idea of how it came about in the first place. In that spirit, here’s some thoughts about male privilege and why it used to be socially stable. (Rambly, not necessarily the best organized. Light on citations, but I can add ‘em later if people want.)

( Read more... )

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Nuclear safety win: Chernobyl returned to Ukrainian control

2022-04-01T14:15:36Z

Reuters reports that as of March 31st, 2022, all Russian military forces have left the vicinity of the Chernobyl exclusion zone and its satellite town of Slavutych (where the various monitoring, safety, & support staff live).

The Guardian confirms this, and adds that the International Atomic Energy Agency has a specific timeline for having a support mission on the ground at Chernobyl, "within a few days".

Cue a medium-sized sigh of relief.

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Link of the day, historical pandemic edition

2022-02-07T04:27:29Z

The 1918 flu didn’t end in 1918. Here’s what its third year can teach us. Archived from the original.

Aside from doing what it says on the tin, archive.today is currently a handy way to circumvent paywalls on several news sites. Their operational (rather than front-page) URL jumps around periodically as a result. So if the archival link stops working, searching for the source address from the archive.today main page should still bring it up.

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Hello, again

2022-01-07T17:05:46Z

Been a long time since I’ve put an actual life update here. If you’re still present and interested in reading what I have to say, I invite you to comment on this post (even if it’s just a single word). :)

( Read more... )

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Wow. I wasn't remotely expecting that.

2021-02-24T11:53:19Z

We just might know how antidepressants work, now. As it turns out, both SSRIs and ketamine bind to a receptor for Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor, TrkB (free article). If you just want the high points, there's a graphical abstract on the front page of the PDF version.

Now, this right here? This made my day. :D

It also offers some new leads to understanding why entire categories of antidepressants don't work for some people. Subtle differences among TrkB alleles and expression frequencies might have big effects on what fits into that molecular pocket and how strong an effect it has. After all, we already know that one particular allele seems to confer a 2.2x risk of suicide attempts in depressed people.

On a more basic research level, we might also be able to develop model animals with cued brain-only overexpression of TrkB (where a gene promoter is added, and operates IFF some exogenous chemical cue is present) to determine what effects it has, and whether it's worthwhile to consider tinkering with the expression rate as a treatment method.

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De-paywalled: What Can Covid-19 Teach Us About the Mysteries of Smell?

2021-02-04T23:44:42Z

Original source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/28/magazine/covid-smell-science.html

tl;dr: Smell is a dominant sense, and invisible in its dominance, much like proprioception.

“People are unaware smell is important until they lose it. And then they’re terrified.”
- Noam Sobel, Weizmann Institute of Science

( Full text, inside. )

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De-paywalled: Some COVID Survivors Haunted by Loss of Smell and Taste

2021-02-04T19:35:21Z

This is far too important a subject to languish behind a paywall. Original article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/02/health/coronavirus-smell-taste.html

tl;dr: Scent is intimately tied to physical and emotional well-being. If you can't smell sulfur dioxide, you can't tell that the kitchen is filling with gas from the oven or stove. If you can't smell food, you're at a real loss for determining whether it's gone off, and even when nothing's wrong with it, most people say that the pleasure of eating is gone. And people with damage to their sense of smell tend to become socially isolated--because face-to-face interactions are no longer enjoyable.

( Full text inside. )

Addendum:
My immediate thought after reading this was, 'What if the Western plague of anomie is down to our cultures' insistence that smelling like oneself is unacceptable?' It's such a simple, pervasive thing. If scent is up there with touch in its ability to create feelings of interpersonal connection and warmth, then what effect does its absence have on political polarization? On a societies' degree of individualism vs. collectivism? On America's basic civil society, which has been crumbling for generations?

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If you could send information back in time...

2018-03-03T13:01:36Z

( ..what would you tell yourself of twenty years ago? )

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Well. So. It's 2018 now.

2018-01-02T06:56:58Z

2017 was a trash fire. It had its moments--even the worst years do--but on the whole, I have more fresh burns from it than anything else.

Good riddance.

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Score one for the social model of disability

2017-07-30T22:45:38Z

Okay, so. The system that brings me my sleep-hack medication is so convoluted that its inability to reliably deliver treatment for my condition automatically renders any commitment I might make into something tenuous, dependent on numerous circumstances I can't control.

( Walking through it... )

The upshot of all this is that every thirty days, my ability to Person is left hanging by a thread, and I'm furious that all the interlocking systems are okay with that.

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Something that fell out of my reading, today...

2017-06-27T07:11:48Z

My current book is Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. I'm less than halfway through, but so far it's fantastic.

I want to talk about one of the exercises, which aims to shake out key bits of "how other people should change to make you feel valued". To do this, one is to quickly and without thinking much, complete the sentences:

* I wish other people were more ______.
* Why is it so hard for people to ______?
* For a change, I would love someone to treat me like ______.
* Maybe one of these days I'll find someone who will ______.
* In an ideal world with good people, other people would ______.

( Continued inside... )

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Where I've been all this time...

2016-11-10T16:47:59Z

Between roughly March and mid-October, I was shuffling from the homes of friends* to relatives' and back again, spending half a week in either so as not to wear out my welcome, and heading out to Leavenworth (location of free housing, far from doctors & therapists) when I couldn't manage one of the transitions. It was exhausting and left me in a constant state of social overextension.

I am presently approaching the end of week 4 of 5 on a sublease and am finally, every so often, starting to have a spoon to spare. Of course, after this, I'll be right back to what's become the ordinary grind. That will last for a week and a half, then at the end of the month I'm off to visit premchaia_pre4 for a couple of weeks. That will be nice.

* 95% kistaro, to whom I remain endlessly grateful.

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Unimpressed.

2016-05-08T01:30:53Z

After learning in mid-March that my liver was markedly unhappy after six-ish months of danazol, I decided to give the Mirena IUD a try. ( Cut for medical content. )

Being poked and prodded for the ultrasound has ratcheted my pain level up to the point where OTC medications are not adequate, and it's lingering.

All I wanted when this saga started was to experience less pain, goddamnit.

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Heads up: canned tuna recall

2016-03-20T23:43:09Z

Bumble Bee & Chicken of the Sea canned tuna items listed here should not be eaten, due to failure of sterilization at the packing plant.

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Danazol, 6-month follow-up/summation

2016-03-15T04:41:53Z

The writeup has been lingering half-written in a tab for a while, and I finally finished it off because I need to reboot. Here it is.

( Cut for medical discussion. )

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