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September 2021

My rheumatoid arthritis has been bad the past few days: awful hip pain and mobility. Today I learned that Nike make shoes - the Go Flyease - for disabled people who struggle to put on shoes. They're hands free. But they've all been bought up by resellers and aren't available.

I have just received an email announcing a “Peer Reviewing Opportunity”.

The language around this stuff does matter and this is aggravating. It's not an “opportunity” or even an “invitation”. Unless you are paying people, it should be a “request”.

Slow unveil...

Been working on this record for over a year during difficult times.

Feat. Rich Gray of Annihilator on guitars.

Coming soon on tici taci.

I'd really like to improve my (python) NLP skills and understanding over the next year. If anyone has any recommendations for lower-end-of-intermediate book reading, I would be extremely grateful.

I have received the letter from the "health" secretary ending shielding. Except it then says how vulnerable the immunocompromised still are. And then recommends actions that are, basically, the same as shielding. Except now with no government endorsement.

Lots of the things I am now just "recommended" to do are near impossible if I returned to normal (which I am not):

* avoid crowded spaces
* continue to practise social distancing
* only meet vaccinated people

The thing about AR glasses that everyone panics about - facial recognition and identifying people - is probably the main reason I'd want them. I am terrible with faces and names.

Anyway, I now get a treat with some afternoon reading: THE FUTURE OF THE PAGE, ed. by Peter Stoicheff and Andrew Taylor.

I'm annoyed how far into my research process it was before I found this. Another major problem with book discoverability.

Back from the scan, which was a pretty exhausting trip. We had to drive to central London because so few people on public transport are wearing masks to protect the vulnerable. But we made it.

The scan was an MRI of my entire spine. Tests at the neurology hospital last month indicated some level of unknown spinal nerve damage, with unknown cause.

The most likely cause is spinal compression from my rheumatoid arthritis. Yep. RA can cause damage to and pressure on the spinal nerves due to inflammation. This progressive, systemic disease is a total bastard that just keeps giving.

It's already caused me to have a stroke, peripheral nerve damage, permanent immunocompromise from treatment, pneumonia and sepsis. It's utterly misnamed. People think "arthritis" is just something your granny gets that makes your hands hurt a bit. It's so much worse.

Anyway, who knows what we'll do about this. It's causing some pretty bad problems for me. But hopefully the scan will give some options and understanding.

Anyway. Never thought we'd drive over Tower Bridge or through Trafalgar Square.

The incompetence around third primary (not booster) jabs for the ultra vulnerable is astonishing. My GP tells me that nobody in this group is getting them nationwide because the system has not been updated yet to accept these as bookings.

Friday music delivery is Craig Bratley on wax and Alabama 3 on CD.

For the latter: their best album in quite a few years here, mostly for Whacked and Yolanda. A shame about the untimely demise of the Rev. D. Wayne Love but he appears on "Tranquilize Yourself Britannia".

It's their most electronic album in quite some time, too. A departure from more recent outings and closer to earlier work like Power in the Blood.

The mix is muddier than I'd like, but that's universally the case on A3 material in my experience.

The Bratley EP is, as ever, ace. He's one of my favourite producers working today.

I don't watch much telly, but was amused during Endeavour to see some strange perfume advert that features equine swimming. Sadly, this is now all I can think about it.

GatherTown is perhaps the least usual conference platform I've yet had to use in these Pandemic Times™

Like some 1990s console game. Alex Kidd in Miracle World or something, except it's Martin Eve in German Library Conference World. 🤣

Gearing up for one of the most exciting times in the @birkbeck_ETC teaching calendar: marking MA dissertations! It's always exciting seeing our students' projects come to intellectual fruition.

This morning's reading is David Diringer's "The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind" (1948), which contains a relatively well-known thesis on how alphabets spread: they "follow religion". I refer to this as The Diringer Linguistic Escape Plan.

One of the best things about staying at my sister-in-law's house while she stays in ours, dogsitting Toby, is seeing the moose that my wife knitted for her in situ! 😂

This was moose-head revisited

Extremely bad news for disabled/vulnerable people, who made up 50% of the fatalities. I have already had conversations with clinicians that begin "it would be best if you remain shielded as you're at serious risk, but that's not the law now" https://www.gov.uk/government/news/shielding-programme-ends-for-most-vulnerable

The individuation of risk for this group, under the guise of protecting mental health/freedom, is terrible. Disability -- and even just safety at work -- rights came about through the law, not by forcing individuals to make their own choices re. risk.

It may be hard to believe, also, but there are actually worse things than shielding -- such as dying alone on a ventilator. Removing protection while claiming it's to help mental health makes vulnerabilities compete with one another in a sick zero-sum game.

It's also the case that for many vulnerable people, putting them in harm's way is going to cause far worse mental health outcomes than shielding.

This is all to say that removing legal protections for this group and making it about clinician choice is really problematic. Clinicians will feel that their hands are tied by these central pronouncements.

thread may interest @chrischirp @SGriffin_Lab @dgurdasani1 @GoodLawProject @ernestopriego

Another point: some clinicians have actually seemed *apologetic* for suggesting that it would be sensible for me to take more stringent protection measures than the bare minimum in law -- as though I would kick back at them like it was their fault...

Hurrah! A day of leave today visiting extended family who have all isolated for my safety, but also signed the open access agreement on this book with OUP.

This evening I'm turning back to Murray's Introduction to Contemporary Print Culture: Books as Media.

I said some nice things to blurb it, but one thing that I don't like is how "conventional" literary studies gets blasted for being purely textual.

I know books and fields work to clear space for themselves, but it's not my experience of my discipline. I remember studying modernist magazines as a crucial form, for instance, in my undergraduate literary studies degree etc.

This week I really began to hit my stride on research leave. Wrote a whole article on Everett's TELEPHONE and submitted it. Got back to writing 1k words or so per day of next book. And finished proofing another.

And now I feel I have earned a beer.

Beer and coded statement

Friday afternoon being interviewed by @blangry for his Ph.D. work on open source/civic tech projects. An old friend from almost two decades ago, it's curious and pleasing how paths cross throughout life.

We both have less hair than we used to.

Ph.D. thesis: bald blokes like open source

Are there any good digital mapping tools to create world maps with just a subset of countries visible? (E.g. Specify a list of included countries to produce a map showing just those)

My physical copy of Inscriptions journal arrived today. It comes with 2x records and a printed edition. It was not cheap, but I am, for once, enjoying the materiality of an academic serial.

Looking forward to this next week. I'll be speaking at ALPSP on the future of the academic book and the work we're doing at @COPIMproject on OA.

I have a strange issue where, when I reboot into Windows, from a Linux system, I then have to reboot _again_ into Windows before my Thunderbolt device will work. It's on an ASRock x570 Taichi. Any ideas appreciated.

Since I finished reading it, I can't stop thinking about Percival Everett's /Telephone/ (2020). It seems to me a novel about our inability to close read, full of lapses in attention as pathology. I have written half an article about it this weekend.

It's a novel that centers on a story of progressive loss and then veers, in part two, towards a /2666/Bolaño-style rescue operation for kidnapped women of Ciudad Juárez. A very strange splicing of two narratives, although both are about trying to save people in distress.

"missed by previous biographies, the FCC mandate to conduct educational broadcasting research for the FREC consortium turns out to be the causative reason that Theodor Adorno was brought to America by John Marshall at the Rockefeller Foundation." https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtab009

A new piece by @joshshepperd

I spent the last 3 hours of last night's sleep dreaming that I couldn't remove some malware from my phone while at the supermarket checkout. I then awoke and exclaimed that the harmonicas were too quiet in my mix. Seems a relaxing night.

This morning I'm reading Lisa Gitelman's ‘Media, Materiality, and the Measure of the Digital: Or, the Case of Sheet Music and the Problem of Piano Rolls’, in Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture, ed. by Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil (Duke UP, 2004), 199–217

Today's postal treat is @Openreflections's LIVING BOOKS: EXPERIMENTS IN THE POSTHUMANITIES, which (revelation) I had the pleasure to peer review for the MIT Press. Pleased also to see that the book is open access, something for which I advocated in my review, given the topic.

Prediction: VIGIL is going to be great detective entertainment, with a very high suspension of disbelief requirement, that is eventually going to side with some dubious stances on the necessity of Britain's nuclear sub fleet.

I feel conflicted by vaccination news this evening. Of course, a third dose could save my life. I also feel desperately though that this is a global problem & we need worldwide vaccination, and my third dose slows that. This is enlightened self interest as well as a moral stance.

Now been contacted four times by @DropboxSupport about entering my date of birth with threat of account deletion. Is it actually possible anywhere on the site to enter this DoB? It is not.