oursin: Photograph of James Miranda Barry, c. 1850 (James Miranda Barry)
[personal profile] oursin

Honestly, people. How is this even A Thing?

NHS staff unsettled by patients filming care and posting videos on social media.

When partner first mentioned this to me I was 'Do they even let them into operating theatre and what about scrubbing up etc?', because I assumed it wasn't actually the patient doing this, and in fact reading further it does seem to be accompanying persons.

Radiographers, who take X-rays and scans, fear the trend could compromise the privacy of other patients being treated nearby and lead to staff having their work discussed online.
The Society of Radiographers (SoR) has gone public with its unease after a spate of incidents in which patients, or someone with them in the hospital, began filming their care.
On one occasion a radiology department assistant from the south coast was inserting a cannula into a patient who had cancer when their 19-year-old daughter began filming.
“She wanted to record the cannulation because she thought it would be entertaining on social media.* But she didn’t ask permission,” the staff member said.
“I spent the weekend afterwards worrying: did I do my job properly? I know I did, but no one’s perfect all the time and this was recorded. I don’t think I slept for the whole weekend.”
They were also concerned that a patient in the next bay was giving consent for a colonoscopy – an invasive diagnostic test – at the same time as the daughter was filming her mother close by. “That could all have been recorded on the film, including names and dates of birth,” they said.
Ashley d’Aquino, a therapeutic radiographer in London, said a colleague had agreed to take photographs for a patient, “but when the patient handed over her phone the member of staff saw that the patient had also been covertly recording her, to publish on her cancer blog.

*Emphasis mine.

First we go back to miasmatic theory, then we go back to operations as spectator sport?

How very different, I would argue, are Barbara Hepworth's 'Hospital Drawings':

Capener began purchasing some of Hepworth’s art, which in turn helped with the costs of her daughter’s surgery. He later asked the artist if she might be interested in observing some of the procedures taking place in the operating theatre. Hepworth, initially horrified by this thought, decided to go. The materials that she needed to make her sculptures were scarce during postwar Britain, meaning she also had more time on her hands to explore other projects.
Hepworth soon became fascinated with the surgical process. She was particularly moved by the methodical rhythm of the surgeon’s hands and the concentration in their eyes. The eyes and hands are rendered with a delicacy and softness, with attentively modulated grey-white tones. They emerge from the cruder, more abstract marks in blue, green and other similar hues. Her drawing techniques somehow brings the scene to life; the many flowing lines are suggestive of the creases forming in the doctors’ blue gowns, created by their constant movement around the horizontal, inert patient. After many visits, Hepworth had created a body of work which revealed her wonderful abilities as a draughtsperson, as well as a sculptor.

A certain chuffedness

Jun. 16th, 2025 07:55 pm
oursin: hedgehog wearing a yellow flower (Hedgehog with flower)
[personal profile] oursin

I cannot help myself feeling a certain gratification when a reviews editor calls the reviews I have just submitted 'beautifully written' and is eager to solicit further (though as I have several others in hand, may not take this up very urgently....) (Preen, preen.)

Have also been solicited quite out of the blue to take part in a podcast. WOT.

It is also very pleasing that the return of Lady Bexbury and her extensive circle is appreciated.

***

Not so very long ago I posted about this lady who worked for SOE way back when: and now Blaise Metreweli named as first woman to lead UK intelligence service MI6.

I thought The secret lives of MI6’s top female spies this was connected - it's actually 2022 but maybe being reposted for the new association. There are several paragraphs of aged former secret agent lady waxing snarky about the sexism aforetimes that precluded advancement up the ranks.

Beneath her tales of life in the service there is real anger about the way women were treated. Both she and her great friend, Daphne Park — a fellow senior SIS officer who died in 2010 at the age of 88 — led distinguished careers but failed to reach the highest ranks. This, they suspected, was due to their gender.
Ramsay speaks in a soft Scots burr which rises audibly when I ask about SIS’s record on female officers. She feels particularly aggrieved that Park, a life-long intelligence officer who held SIS postings in Moscow, Lusaka, Hanoi and Ulan Bator, did not progress to the most senior levels. (MI6 would neither confirm nor deny it had employed Park.) “There’s no doubt in my mind that Daphne should have been at least one rung up as the deputy chief position. I can say that without any equivocation,” Ramsay says, tapping a lacquered pink fingernail on the table. Park, described unkindly in one obituary as looking “more like Miss Marple than Mata Hari”, resigned early from the service in 1979, having told a friend that she would never be promoted to SIS chief because of her gender.
By the early 1990s, Ramsay was rumoured to be in the running for the post of C, although shortlists are never publicly acknowledged. Privately, she thought the promotion of a woman to that role would still be “quite impossible”.... She observes that while many talented women such as Noor Inayat Khan excelled in the Special Operations Executive, a wartime secret service and sabotage unit set up in 1940, there was a long period afterwards when women ceased to be employed as intelligence officers at all. Ramsay recounts an episode in the 1970s when she came across a woman she thought would make a “perfect” agent-runner. She telephoned the head of recruitment to discuss the prospect, who told her they weren’t looking for women. “He said, ‘It would take an extraordinary gel’ — and it was the ‘gel’ that got to me — ‘to be an intelligence officer’. And I said, ‘Well, it would take an extraordinary boy too, but it hasn’t stopped you recruiting males!’”

(no subject)

Jun. 16th, 2025 10:04 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] quoththeravyn and [personal profile] rahael!

Culinary

Jun. 15th, 2025 07:16 pm
oursin: Frontispiece from C17th household manual (Accomplisht Lady)
[personal profile] oursin

Last week's bread held out very well.

There was even enough left over to make frittata with chopped red bell pepper for Friday night supper.

Saturday breakfast rolls: brown toasted pinenut, with strong brown flour.

Today's lunch: partridge breasts lightly seasoned with salt and pepper, panfried in butter with a little olive oil, deglazed with a splash or so of white wine, served with kasha, baby sugar snap peas roasted in walnut oil and splashed with elderflower vinegar, and asparagus steamed and tossed in melted butter + lime juice.

(no subject)

Jun. 15th, 2025 01:11 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] twistedchick!
siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
I have a question about eye safety, maybe someone here can advise me on.

Apropos of the protests going on, I've seen a lot of helpful pointers about preparing for getting tear gassed or pepper sprayed, such as not to wear contacts and to have tight-fitting chemists' goggles. But not wearing vision correction is not an option for those who need it, and the alternative to contacts is glasses, which are apparently incompatible with most eye protection from gas or particulates.

I am aware of the existence of some models of full-face gas mask that have internal mounting hardware for glasses, but in addition to being expensive themselves, they require getting lenses made and fitted to the gas mask (i.e. not compatible with regular glasses). I'm surmising the existence of these means that other, cheaper, spectacle-compatible eye protection doesn't really exist, but I thought I'd ask.

My personal interest in the topic is less about protecting myself from chemical ordnance at protests – I only wish I could attend protests (though if things got spicy in the right location I suppose I could collect my fair share of tear gas at home) – than from wildfire smoke. The conjunction of the No Kings protests and the local air quality alerts from fires in Canada reminded me I should really be doing some preparation in this space.

I'm allergic to smoke. (It turns out it wasn't con crud I kept getting at Pennsic.) My reactivity to smoke only seems to be gradually getting worse over time. So when I've heard reports or seen pictures from the left coast of the sorts of wildfire smog they have there, I'm like "...not enough steroids in the world." I mostly manage this threat by not crossing the Mississippi, but it could happen here. Or upwind of here. It has. If not quite so "blot out the sun" bad, certainly bad enough for me to feel it.

So I've been looking at half-face elastomeric respirators, but that leave eyes unprotected.

Any suggestions?

Edit: I'm getting a lot of suggestions that aren't really helpful because:

1) Most safety goggles are for protection against impact or splashes, and as such literally have vent holes that make them useless against gases and airborne particulates.

2) Involve buying a prescription eyepiece. The whole point of my question was looking for alternatives to buying additional prescription lenses. Like I said, I am already aware of options that entail ordering custom lenses, I am looking for alternatives that don't involve that and are compatible with regular glasses the wearer already has.

There may not be any*, which would be good to know, but that is the question.

Allow me to put a finer point on this. If there is no affordable, readily available option for eye protection against gas/powder attacks for people who are dependent on vision correction, then that implies something important about protest safety that is entirely missing from all of the discourse of the sort that recommends having a gas mask to go to a protest.

* Since posting, I learned the term PAPR, and am now wondering why they're so expensive and whether that's a technology ripe for DIY.

Music Saturday

Jun. 14th, 2025 09:24 pm
muccamukk: Elyanna singing, surrounded by emanata and hearts. (Music: Elyanna Hearts)
[personal profile] muccamukk

Surprisingly sapphic for Raye (who usually sings about relationships with men, but maybe she's bi?). I guess she was at World Pride? Hmm...

Where would I even begin?

Jun. 14th, 2025 05:28 pm
oursin: Books stacked on shelves, piled up on floor, rocking chair in foreground (books)
[personal profile] oursin

(And didn't we have something similar, like, maybe 20 years ago on LiveJournal?)

Thing going round on bluesky recently-

'Ten authors you've read five books by'.

*Looks around just one room and its bookshelves*

Me: Maybe I could break this down into groups, I dunno, perhaps?

Thrillers? Sff? Litfic? (might break this down further into Obscure Victorian/Edwardian Novelists, Middlebrow Women Writers of the 20s/30s, the 60s Generation???) Bloke writers for whom I have a weakness? Beloved childhood faves?

And then I think, nah, this is too much effort.

I was a bit took aback by suggestions that people might be curating their 10 to look Cool or SRS or at least, not given to ingesting The Wrong Sort of Book, perish the thort.

Various & misc

Jun. 13th, 2025 04:54 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin

Don't think I've previously either come across this or posted it, but who knows: Out on the Town: Magnus Hirschfeld and Berlin’s Third Sex: 'Years before the Weimar Republic’s well-chronicled freedoms, the 1904 non-fiction study Berlin’s Third Sex depicted an astonishingly diverse subculture of sexual outlaws in the German capital'.

***

Something else suitable for Pride Month: Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love (review):

provides an original and stirring account of a non-commodifying queer love between two women and nonhuman nature—a love that was the defining relationship of Carson’s life and yet has been downplayed in heteronormative tellings of her story. So, too, is Maxwell’s work a convincing argument for this queer love’s formative role in the writing of Silent Spring, as well as an empowering message about how embracing queer feelings might function as a catalyst for “political and personal power” in contemporary environmental politics.

***

I think I have some copies of The Pioneer journal associated with this club, but they are somewhere in the maelstrom (I am gearing up to Doing Something About this, having acquired intelligence of a body that will collect books for charity): The Pioneer Club (1892-1939): A ladies' club at the forefront of late Victorian social reform, which suffered a long, slow decline in the early 20th century.

***

Peter McLagan (1823-1900): Scotland’s first Black MP:

[S]ources suggest that McLagan’s mother was probably of Black Caribbean or Black African descent.... McLagan’s father, Peter McLagan (1774-1860)... enslaved over 400 people on his plantations and personal estate in Demerara.

In fact there is strong evidence as mentioned in that article that he was by no means the first Black MP. Issues of class and family connections clearly played a significant role up to the mid-C19th.

***

An ancient writing system confounding myths about Africa:

'How come a country that did not have a colonial past in Zambia had so many artefacts from Zambia in its collection?'"
In the 19th and early 20th Centuries Swedish explorers, ethnographers and botanists would pay to travel on British ships to Cape Town and then make their way inland by rail and foot.
....
The Swedish museum had not done any research on the cloaks - and the National Museums Board of Zambia was not even aware they existed.

***

Artist's work to restore damaged shell grotto (I put this in a short story once.) (My own theory is that it was originally A Folly. Doing things with shells was as I recall quite A Thing in the C18th and Mrs Delany and her mate the Duchess of Portland had a rather less concealed shell grotto?)

(no subject)

Jun. 13th, 2025 10:01 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] arkessian and [personal profile] ironed_orchid!
mecurtin: WW2 We Can Do It! poster, showing white woman in red-and-white-spotted bandana, rolling up sleeve of blue work shirt and flexing arm, saying We Can Do It! (resistance)
[personal profile] mecurtin
Indivisible #WhatsThePlan meeting of May 12 2025
This is pretty much just C&P from my bluesky liveblog, plus links.

cut for length, US politics )
I really admire people who can write *most* of what happens in a meeting while they liveblog, Ezra & Leah both talk *really* fast & I just pull out highlights, really. whoosh.

Please reblog, signal boost. We are, as Leah says, in a time of autocratic breakthrough, and one way we fight back is to have as many people as possible, in as many places as possible, out peacefully on Saturday. We need to be *everywhere*, with *everyone*. Take American flags, they belong to *US*, not him.
oursin: A cloud of words from my LJ (word cloud)
[personal profile] oursin

Okay, am v depressed by all the ongoing hoohah around AI and the people using it rather than their own brains, quite aside from Evil Exploitation aspect -

- but on intellectual pollution, having been moaning inwardly, banging the floor with my ebony cane and beating my head on my antimacassar for a considerable while over the awful errors that appear in prose because the word is correctly spelt but it is THE WRONG BLOODY WORD.

That the person who created that text has not picked up on, sigh, groan.

Insert here a lament for the decline in copy-editing and proof-reading, which might have spotted this sort of thing and corrected it.

I am a little worried that we are now have generations who do not know what words actually mean, because spell-check has not said anything .

This is brought to you by having encountered the term 'itinerary' deployed for something that is not, as far as I can see, a journey, but the programme/timetable for a meeting. Perhaps there is some sense of a progression to be made???

(The mermaids signing, each to each: that is why I cannot hear them.)

(no subject)

Jun. 12th, 2025 09:48 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] ase!

Time Bandits!

Jun. 11th, 2025 10:47 pm
cofax7: then you counterattack (Bujold - Strategy)
[personal profile] cofax7
Well I watched the Apple+ show Time Bandits, and it was hella fun! I particularly liked Bittelig and Penelope. But now I'm sad because it's been cancelled.

I am desperately trying not to get stressed out about The Omnishambles, but it's kind of hard.

Be safe, y'all!
dragoness_e: Living Dead Girl (Living Dead Girl)
[personal profile] dragoness_e
So far, every single fanfic longer than about 400K words has been in desperate need of editing. No, I am not including series whose cumulative word count is greater than that, because the smaller individual stories are usually fine. I am referring to single fics that weigh in at 500K or more.

If you are writing purely for self-indulgence, and don't care if no one else reads your fics or likes them, fine, this doesn't affect you. However, if you are writing for an audience that you hope will enjoy your fic, please look over your massive epic carefully. In my experience as a reader, the middles of such fics are often rambling, with the plot wandering in repetitive circles, or the main character having redundant character-development arcs, or otherwise slow and boring.

Less is more. Prune some of those plot branches; tighten up your character-development arcs. You don't need to show every minute of the main characters recovery from trauma, or falling in love, or having important epiphanies. You don't need to have the main ship characters having the same argument over and over--let them settle it the first or second time! Hit the highlights and key epiphanies of character-development arcs--don't grind them into the dirt with repetition. Move the plot along. Let stuff happen; keep the reader interested. Have an end point in mind, and stick the landing.

I have yet to see a single long story that couldn't have been told in 350K or so words, at most. If there are multiple major, long plot arcs, you might actually have multiple stories in a trench-coat, and should recast it as a series of stories. Otherwise, your story probably needs some editing and pruning; it's gotten leggy and tangled.

Just don't bore your reader, because that's more likely to lose them once they've started reading than missing content warnings or the wrong ship.
oursin: Photograph of small impressionistic metal figurine seated reading a book (Reader)
[personal profile] oursin

What I read

Gail Godwin, Getting to Know Death: A Meditation (2024) - rather slight, one for the completist, which I suppose I am.

Robert Rodi, Bitch Goddess (2014): 'told entirely through interviews, e-mails, fan magazine puff pieces, film reviews, shooting scripts, greeting cards, extortion notes, and court depositions', the story of the star of a lot of dire B-movies who has a later-life move into soap-stardom. I hadn't read this one before and it was a lot of campy fun.

TC Parker, Tradwife (2024) - another of those mystery/thrillers which riffs off true-crime style investigation - somebody here I think mentioned it? - I thought it went a few narrative twists too far though was pretty readable up till then.

On the go

Apart from those, still ticking on with Upton Sinclair, Wide Is The Gate (Lanny Budd, #4), boy I am glad that I am reading these in e-form, because they must be monstrous great bricks otherwise. In this one he actually ventures back to Germany, his marriage starts to crumble, he continues his delicate dance between all the various opposed interests in his life while managing to get support to the anti-Nazi/Fascist cause, Spain is now in the picture, and I have just seen a passing mention to Earl Russell being sent down for his Reno divorce (that wasn't quite the story, but one can quite imagine that was what gossip might have made of it 30 years down the line).

Up next

New Literary Review.

The three books for the essay review.

I think more Robert Rodi might be a nice change of pace from Lanny's ordeals.

(no subject)

Jun. 11th, 2025 09:49 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] angevin and [personal profile] spaceoperadiva!

(no subject)

Jun. 10th, 2025 10:42 am
seekingferret: Two warning signs one above the other. 1) Falling Rocks. 2) Falling Rocs. (Default)
[personal profile] seekingferret
The Sicilian Inheritance by Jo Piazza

I wasn't quite sure what this book wanted to be, it was doing three genres of middlebrow novel all at once and not quite pulling any of them off, but in the end I was not too unhappy to have kept with it.

Sara Marsala, our heroine, is the daughter of a messy Italian-American family. She is dealing with a divorce, the failure of her restaurant, and a general sense of failure and helplessness. When her beloved aunt dies, her aunt's will sends her back to the Old Country of rural Sicily, to Find Her Roots and see if an old deed for a plot of land in Sicily, passed down from her great-grandmother who never made it to America, is still valid. When she arrives in Sicily she is informed that her great grandmother was Murdered, contradicting family lote, and the plot is afoot.

The book tries to be a historical fiction novel about life in early 20th century Sicily, an action packed murder mystery, and an eat pray love European adventure, and the three visions of the book war with each other, not helped by lazy plotting with unjustified expository leaps obscuring story details I wanted to see fleshed out.

But it's the wanted to see fleshed out that frustrated me, because the story concept works and there are some really great characters both in the historical flashbacks and the modern narrative and I really was hoping that things would get worked out with just a bit more craft.
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