em_h

Kurt Kohlstedt has spent ten years creating audio and print stories for the design podcast, 99% Invisible. He also co-authored the 99% Invisible City book.

Last year, 99pi’s Kurt Kohlstedt suffered a severe injury that incapacitated his right arm and dominant hand. In the aftermath, new everyday challenges led him to research, test, and evolve accessible design solutions. These experiences set the stage for Adapt or Design, a twelve-part project of 99% Invisible in three acts, available at the short link 99pi.org/adapt

The Adapt or Design series includes many groan-worthy puns related to hands; six essays exploring assistive designs for people with one functional hand; three design hacks and mods that helped Kurt manage long-term rehabilitation; and three final essays diving deep into adaptive writing technologies including a free one-handed "mirror keyboard" for Windows PowerToys.

While the first article posted in April, I just heard about it via the 99% Invisible podcast 630, where Kurt and Roman talk about all these things.

oursin

After a few distinctly less than summery days, today has been quite sunny.

Okay, I think I've had some of these before.... maybe.
Summer Nights

Watch on YouTube

The downside: Summertime Blues:

Watch on YouTube

Not sure if Summer Wine is for drinking then, or made then, with sinister summer herbs:

Watch on YouTube

Obligatory Lovin' Spoonful

Watch on YouTube

Kinks chilling on a Lazy Sunny Afternoon:

Watch on YouTube

Carole King another one wanting it to be over:

Watch on YouTube

pegkerr

My cousin Jill's Year of Adventure suggestion for me was to take a couple of hours volunteering together to plant some trees with Great River Greening. So, we signed up for a shift, and last Saturday on a beautiful sunny day, the two of us, along with her partner Jack, met in a park in Brooklyn Center.

The volunteer coordinators had the process down to a well-rehearsed presentation, and we three ended up planting three trees in all in the two-hour time slot. The first two were straightforward enough, and third, a Catalpa, had evidently been in the pot too long. The tap root had pushed through the hole in the bottom and grown large enough to embed itself into the plastic. It took a twenty minutes struggle to get it out of the pot.

It was hot by the time we finished up, and I'd exerted myself enough during the struggle with the stubborn tree to be glad to drink down the water I'd brought and sit in the shade a bit. But we enjoyed ourselves, and there are now three new trees in a park in Brooklyn Center, thanks to our efforts. Afterward, we drove to Jack and Jill's house for lunch, where I admired their extensive gardens and patio under the beautiful spreading oak tree.

A day well spent in the outdoors.

Image description: Lower center: head and shoulders of two women and a man, wearing hats, smiling at the camera. Center: The same three people are planting a tree. Overlaid over the tree are the words "Great River Greening."

Tree Planting

22 Tree Planting

Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

Current Mood: pleased

rachelmanija

This sequel to one of my favorite books of last year, a young adult post-apocalypse novel with a lovely slow-burn gay romance, fell victim to a trope I basically never like: the sequel to a romance that starts out by breaking up the main couple or pitting them against each other. It may be realistic but I hate it. If the main thing I liked about the first book was the main couple's dynamic - and if I'm reading the sequel, that's definitely the case - then I'm never going to like a sequel where their dynamic is missing or turns negative. I'm not saying they can't have conflict, but they shouldn't have so much conflict that there's nothing left of the relationship I loved in the first place.

This book starts out with Jamison and Andrew semi-broken up and not speaking to each other or walking on eggshells around each other, because Andrew wants to stay in the nice post-apocalyptic community they found and Jamison wants to return to their cabin and live alone there with Andrew. Every character around them remarks on this and how they need to just talk to each other. Eventually they talk to each other, but it resolves nothing and they go on being weird about each other and mourning the loss of their old relationship. ME TOO.

Then half the community's children die in a hurricane, and it's STILL all about them awkwardly not talking to each other and being depressed. I checked Goodreads, saw that they don't make up till the end, and gave up.

The first book is still great! It didn't need a sequel, though I would have enjoyed their further adventures if it had continued the relationship I loved in the first book. I did not sign up for random dead kids and interminable random sulking.

oursin

I did a quick search over past posts and I see that bibliotherapy has been a thing that I have been posting the odd link about for A Long Time, though I see the School of Life's page thereon is now 404. In the way that things are constantly being suddenly NEW, I see I also had a link much more recently on the topic about which was cynical.

But I find this article really quite amusing if sometimes determined to use all the Propah Academyk Speek: Reading as therapy: medicalising books in an era of mental health austerity:

When reading is positioned as therapy, we argue, evaluative intentions intersect awkwardly with the cultural logics of literature, as practitioners and commissioners grapple with what it means to extract ‘wellbeing effects’ from a diffuse and everyday practice. As a result, what might look initially like another simple case of medicalisation turns out to have more uncertain effects. Indeed, as we will show, incorporating the ‘reading cure’ troubles biomedicine, foregrounding both the deficiencies of current public health responses to the perceived crisis of mental health, and the poverty of causal models of therapeutic effect in public health. There are, then, potentially de-medicalising as well as medicalising effects.

We get the sense that the project was constantly escaping from any endeavours to confine it within meshes of 'evidence-based medicine': 'Trying to fit the square peg of reading into the round hole of evidence is where things sometimes get awkward.'

Larfed liek drayne:

In five experiments on how reading fiction impacts on measures of wellbeing, Carney and Robertson found no measurable effects from simply being exposed to fiction: the mechanism, they note, is not akin to a pharmaceutical that can prescribed.

dewline

He was Canada's first astronaut.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/montreal/article/marc-garneau-dead-at-76/

Current Mood: sad

twistedchick

ICE pretending to be utility workers giving 'free estimates'. BEWARE!

oursin

What I read

KJ Charles, Copper Script (2025): somehow not among my top KJCs.

Finished Bitch in a Bonnet Vol 2, perhaps even better than vol 1.

Angela Thirkell, The Old Bank House (1949): not quite sure why this got to be picked as a Virago Modern Classic: WO WO Iron Heel of THEM i.e. the 1945 Labour Government, moan whinge, etc etc; also several rather repetitious passages of older generation maundering to themselves about the dire prospects that await the younger members.

Finished Dragon's Teeth, the last parts of which were quite the wild ride.

Latest Slightly Foxed, a bit underwhelmed, well, they can't always be talking about things that really interest/excite me or rouse fond memories I suppose.

On the go

Have started Upton Sinclair. Wide is the Gate (Lanny Budd, #4) (1943) simply because I had very strong 'what happens next? urges after the end of Dragon's Teeth, but that gets answered in the first few chapters, and I think that in this one we're already getting strong hints that Lanny is about to head southwards to Spain, just in time for things to start getting violent. I might take a break.

I have just started a romance by an author I have vaguely heard well of and was a Kobo deal but don't think it's for me.

Up next

Dunno: perhaps that Gail Godwin memoir.

***

*Even barely woken up I was not at all sure that this was not all one of those cunning scams that is in fact a fraudster telling you they are your bank/credit card co, but it turned out it was actually about somebody making fraudulent charges - in really odd small ways - on my card, when I got onto the website and found the number to ring - the number being called from with automated menu bearing no resemblance to the one on my card, ahem - went through all the procedures and card is being cancelled and new one sent. SIGH. This is second credit card hoohah in two days, yesterday got text re upcoming due payment for which bill has so far failed to arrive, for the one for which logging into website involves dangers untold and hardships unnumbered and having the mobile app. (Eventually all resolved.)

oursin

Happy birthday,

starlady!

rachelmanija

A historical children's novel by a Ukrainian-Canadian author, based on Ukrainian teenagers and children forced into slavery during WWII. After watching her neighbors and finally her family getting dragged off by the Nazis, Lida, a Christian Ukrainian girl, is kidnapped along with her younger sister. They're immediately separated and Lida is sent to a horrendous work camp. She's skilled at sewing, which keeps her useful and so alive for a while. But then the Nazis need bombs more than uniforms...

This book is an impressive feat of walking the line between being honest and straightforward about how terrible conditions are while not being too overwhelming for children to read. Lida and the other girls endure and try to support each other. Lida gives a Jewish girl her crucifix necklace to help hide her identity, and an older girl advises Lida to lie about her age so she isn't killed immediately for being too young to work. The German seamstress Lida works with (an employee, not a prisoner) is occasionally casually kind to her, but also gets a gift of looted clothing from a probably murdered French woman, and gets Lida to meticulously remove the woman's stitched-in initials and re-sew them with her own. A Hungarian political prisoner, who gets better soup than the Ukrainians, advises Lida to say she's Polish, as that will improve her her food. Later, Lida muses, It seemed that just as there were different soups, there were different ways of being killed, depending on your nationality.

( Read more... )

The book is interesting as a depiction of an aspect of WWII that isn't written about much, a compelling read, and a moving story about some people trying to keep hope and caring - and rebellion - alive when others are being as bad as humans can get. It's part of a trio of books involving overlapping characters, but stands completely on its own.

The afterword says that Skrypuch based the book on her interviews with a survivor.

oursin

In June 1868 the University of London's Senate had voted to admit women to sit the 'General Examination', so becoming the first British university to accept female candidates:

Women's higher education in London dates from the late 1840s, with the foundation of Bedford College by the Unitarian benefactor, Elisabeth Jesser Reid. Bedford was initially a teaching institution independent of the University of London, which was itself an examining institution, established in 1836. Over the next three decades, London University examinations were available only to male students.
Demands for women to sit examinations (and receive degrees) increased in the 1860s. After initial resistance a compromise was reached.
In August 1868 the University announced that female students aged 17 or over would be admitted to the University to sit a new kind of assessment: the 'General Examination for Women'.

***

Sexism in science: 7 women whose trailblazing work shattered stereotypes. Yeah, we note that this was over 100 years since the ladies sitting the University of London exams, and passing.

***

A couple of recent contributions from Campop about employment issues in the past:

Who was self-employed in the past?:

It is often assumed that industrial Britain, with its large factories and mines employing thousands of people, left little space for individuals running their own businesses. But not everyone was employed as a worker for others. Some exercised a level of agency operating on their own as business proprietors, even if they were also often very constrained.
Over most of the second half of the 19th century as industrialisation accelerated, the self-employed remained a significant proportion of the population – about 15 percent of the total economically active. It was only in the mid-20th century that the proportion plummeted to around eight percent.

and

Home Duties in the 1921 Census:

What women in ‘home duties’ were precisely engaged in still remains a mystery, reflecting the regular obstruction of women’s everyday activity from the record across history. For some, surely ‘home duties’ reflected hard physical labour (particularly in washing), as well as hours of childcare exceeding the length of the factory day. For others, particularly the aspirational bourgeois, the activities of “home duties” involved little actual housework. 5.1 percent of wives in home duties had servants to assist them, a rate which doubled for clerks’ wives to 11.7 percent. For them, household “work” involved little physical action. Though this may have given some of these women the opportunity to spend their hours in cultural activities or socialising, for others it possibly reflected crushing boredom.

Though I wonder to what extent these women were doing something, more informally, that would be invisible to the census and formal measures generally that contributed to the household economy - I'm thinking of the neighbour in my childhood who cut hair at home - ads in interwar women's mags for various money-making home-based schemes - writers one has heard whose sales were a significant factor in the overall family income - etc

***

And on informal contributions, Beyond Formal and Informal: Giving Back Political Agency to Female Diplomats in Early Nineteenth Century Europe:

[H]istorians such as Jeroen Duindam show that there were never explicitly separate spheres for men and women when working for the state in the early nineteenth-century. Drawing a line separating ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ diplomats in the early nineteenth-century, simply based on their gender alone, does not do these women justice.

***

And I am very happy to see this receiving recognition, though how far has something which got reprinted after 30 years be considered languishing in obscurity, huh? as opposed to having created a persistent fanbase: A Matter of Oaths – Helen Wright.

oursin

Happy birthday,

pennski and

threeringedmoon!

pegkerr

As I posted last Saturday, I have been working to assemble an anthology to submit to a contest with the Minnesota Authors Project (among others). I hadn't assembled as many authors as I had hoped, but we put together a nice little ebook, and I was proud of it and excited to enter the contest. We finished pulling it all together by 6 pm the day before the final deadline, and I went to the contest portal to submit it.

And at the last minute, after I had spent a good 40 minutes working my way through the portal and was just about to push the 'Submit' button, a Terms and Agreement page popped up that turned all my hopes to ashes.

The book had to be already published.

Now, I had inquired about that. The person I'd gotten the flyer from wasn't sure, and the website didn't mention anything about that requirement.

I had arranged with a letter of agreement with my authors specifically stating my understanding that this WASN'T a promise of publication, but that if we won the contest, we could make decisions about publishing at that time.

So, extremely mortified, I had to go back to the authors and explain. I'd done my due diligence, I had wondered about that very question, checked the website and the flyer, and I'd still gotten it wrong.

Some of the contributors wondered whether we could quickly self-publish, throwing it up on Amazon, of course the very reasonable expectation requested was that I would then promote and distribute it. I had very little time to make the decision, and I never heard back from one of my contributors, and I was badly rattled by making such a mistake. Maybe it was a lack of courage, but I just couldn't make the promise. I don't have my own website or any kind of mailing list. I didn't think I could (after letting my contributors down so badly) volunteer to do something that would let them down even further.

So we missed the contest deadline.

I am going to try to find more contributors and figure out a way to publish it. And hope that we can enter it in the contest next year.

I feel so very mortified and foolish. At least two of the contributors wrote new material for this project, and I feel keenly that I let them down. Professional embarrassment is the WORST.

But! This is the year of adventure, and that means trying new things. And sometimes, when you try new things, you fail. And that (I am telling myself firmly) is okay.

Here is the beautiful cover that Bruce Bethke designed for the book we had planned, and I hope eventually it will come to fruition.

Shelves of Wonder cover

Current Mood: embarrassed

oursin

Today I already had the fret of a physio appointment re the neck & shoulder issue coming up in early afternoon.

During the morning I had an email from online pharmacy that ooops, migraine prophylaxis drug I have been taking for some years (and which I apprehend one is not supposed to cease abruptly) they are having supply problems with. Log in to account to contact them.

(This involved a certain amount of faff with their chat client, which froze my browser.)

a)Various options involving see if I can source it from local pharmacy and they will send prescription.

b)Wait and see if they can acquire supply.

c)Contact GP about possible substitute.

I discovered that at least one local pharmacy did have it in stock, so went for first option.

Though on reflection thought I would at least see if other local pharmacy, which was not responding to call to number on NHS site, and which was more or less on the way back from physio appt, also had it.

They did, and also the staff there are a lot more agreeable than the last time I had occasion to visit it.

I hope this was just a temporary supply blip....

Physio resulted in Yet Another Set of Exercises, which we may hope do not set off massive excruciating lower back pain, and also a repeat appointment in a fortnight, with this therapist and their supervisor -

Modified yay, even if it is a) at 1 pm and b) at the uphill all the way health centre.

oursin

Happy birthday,

bearshorty,

sylvaine and

trinker!

twistedchick

This is what I want to see again, in my lifetime.

oursin

This week's bread: a loaf of 50:50% strong white and einkorn flour, with a little splash of oil when making up, turned out very nice.

Saturday breakfast rolls: brown grated apple, strong brown flour, and Rayner's Classic Organic Barley Malt Extract, which is much nicer than most other malt extracts.

Today's lunch: pseudo-spanokopita, spinach sauteed in butter and seasoned with salt, pepper, nutmeg and lemon thyme, pie-dish lined with sheets of filo brushed with olive oil, layer of the spinach, soft cheese, rest of spinach, more sheets of filo, baked for 45 mins in a very moderate oven; served with baked San Marzano tomatoes and white chicory quartered, healthy-grilled in walnut oil and splashed with bramble vinegar.

dewline

The Bay was a retail fixture of my life. I didn't expect to outlive the company.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/hudsons-bay-8300-employees-june-1-1.7544639

Current Mood: contemplative

oursin

Happy birthday,

sea_changed!

oursin

Naturally, I feared the worst from the headline: ‘Men need liberation too’: do we need more male novelists?, but apart from the guy who is the editor of this new imprint which is to encourage poor wittle male authors (Son of Mybug, well, I guess, Grandson? Great-Grandson? Distant Descendant discovered through sending his DNA to be tested?) they are all actually WTF, FFS, what are you talking about?

He moans on that the vast majority of commissioning editors in publishing are women, which I fancy is a situation that has historically pertained for Quite Some Time and did not happen just yesterday, and there have been Fabled Agents and Editors of Ye Fayre Sexxe who were the champions of Bloke Writers, some of whom were fairly toxic specimens (e.g. look at some of the authors with whom Diana Athill worked closely).

Come on down Anne Enright:

The majority female readership is generous to male writers, while male readers continue to be reluctant about reading and praising women.... More books are being published today than ever before, and this includes more books by men. I have seen publishers eat up novels by younger men (especially Irish men, I am glad to say). I have seen them fall on such books with relief that they exist and that they are good. I don’t see any problem with men getting published, when those men are not misogynistic, because it is actually misogyny that has gone out of fashion, not male writers. I worry about men who miss all that, and who miss the inflated, undeserved feeling of importance of the good old days.

Yay Leo Robson:

Anyone who knows anything about anything, or at least about the English novel, knows that it can never be “too female”.... There have been periods when male novelists consumed most of the attention: notably in the 1980s and early 1990s, when it was deemed necessary to found a women’s prize for fiction. But everyone knew that the leading English novelists were Penelope Fitzgerald and Iris Murdoch, who wrote often and brilliantly about men.... Of course I am exaggerating, slightly. There have been some decent male novelists. If this were not the case, it would have been somewhat presumptuous or arrogant to have attempted writing a novel myself.

Sarah Moss suggests maybe the problem is men as readers:

I suspect that if there is a problem with men’s literary fiction, it’s as much to do with reading as writing. The gender (im)balance of audiences at book events suggests that men much prefer to read nonfiction.... If patriarchy means that some men miss out on the joys of literature, that’s quite low on the list of its harms and also unlikely to be fixed by setting up a men’s publishing house. I wonder also how much this is a British problem, because I can immediately think of dozens of Irish men, established and emerging writers, publishing very well-received novels.... Many men, it seems, experience no curiosity about the female gaze, or women’s experiences. Maybe women, who always used to read men and buy their books, are beginning to return the compliment.

99PI Staffer Goes Deep Into Assistive Tech

Nostalgic Music Party!

2025 52 Card Project: Week 22: Tree Planting

The Only Light Left Burning, by Erik J. Brown: DNF

I think this article is saying It's All More Complicated?

RIP: Marc Garneau

AWAKE! AWAKE! FEAR! FIRE! FOES! AWAKE! AWAKE!

Wednesday had text and phonecalls about credit card fraud BEFORE COFFEE*

(no subject)

Making Bombs For Hitler, by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

Vaguely connected things

(no subject)

Well, this is mortifying

That was a health-related aaargh I could have done without

(no subject)

New Substack post

Culinary

The Bay: Going Away

(no subject)

Actually, this was a lot less Mybuggery than I anticipated

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December 2018

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