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March 2024

Thanks to generosity of friends and family, I am having a hip replacement next weekend. Not looking forward to the procedure, but very keen on a good outcome. Hoping to be back on my feet again.

I love it when formal, printed bibliographies include Facebook referrer codes - betrays an information ignorance about how URLs work as well as being bad tracking practice

I applaud the general disdain for the Garrick Club's sexism, but a broader problem is the existence in the first place of elite "clubs" where our governing class mingle and mix out of the sight of accountability.

Unsure I agree wholly with the taxonomy -- would need to think about it more -- but a good primer on the fact that there are many, many more models than APCs/BPCs for OA and lots don't involve author pays. https://t.co/Y104lVwWc8

A frustrating academic consequence of needing dialysis is that you become far less visible, because travelling to conferences becomes impossible. So far I've declined funded speaking opportunities in China and Germany this month.

British train fares are a disgrace, but just in case you felt good about it somehow they have to rub the word "free" in your face and tell you they haven't charged you a fee to buy their product.

Finished writing a conference paper this morning and did a bit more work on the Star Trek book. Now it's that time again: 4.5 hours of haemodialysis.

Did my first trip to London, for hospital, in my wheelchair today. Southeastern trains were actually really good at helping with ramps. It is also totally true, as many wheelchair users have reported, that people talk to your pusher, not to you.

Since we're talking open access monographs, here are mine.

Theses ... 2024
DH & Lit 2022
Warez 2021
Reading Peer Review 2021
Reassembling Schol Comms 2020
Close Reading w/ Computers 2019
Lit Against Crit 2016
Password 2016
OA & Hums 2014
Pynchon ... 2014

https://eve.gd/books/

NHS hip appointment. Rearranged weeks ago to be telephone. Day comes: no call. No telephone number for direct to clinic to ask about this. So much of the healthcare system is about stopping patients from getting access/making things hard and it's really frustrating.

Result: they discharged me. Then realised it was their mistake. So they rescheduled me, another month away. Also not a telephone clinic as requested.

This June I will be giving a paper that goes back to my roots at @artofile's Preface, Prelude, Prologue conference.

‘Begin at the beginning, the King said, very gravely’: Serious Openings and Subversive Epigraphs in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon

Never judge a book by its...

No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into.

Honestly, have no idea what has happened to my hip today. It was very painful before, but now it's agony, even with morphine. The bone-on-bone articulation possibly trapping a nerve? As I said, it feels worse than a break.

Advice needed! My mobility has taken a nose dive this AM. Hip is unusable and can't walk any distance (5m). Pain worse than a broken leg. I'm due to be in a London hospital on Thursday. Is there any kind of assistance I can get to reach a taxi from the train? How good is it?

World kidney day - did you know that if your kidneys fail, you're likely to need *3 years* of dialysis before a transplant match comes up? It's 3-5 hours, at least 3x per week, in hospital. If you can donate a kidney, please consider it. You'd change a life.

Apparently all groups or individuals who promote violence are "extremist", unless they advocate for an MP to be shot and have given £10m to the Conservative Party.

Giving a presentation to colleagues at the end of the day on current work in progress. Have to resist the temptation to break what I've currently got. But surely I can just add that one last feature. What could go wrong?

Today is world kidney day. If you don't know much about what your kidneys do, I recommend you read up on it and look after them. I took them for granted until about a year and a half ago... and then, they were gone, and life was never the same.

I'm edging closer to having a prototype system that allows you to register a DOI for monitoring and, if it goes offline, to automatically activate multiple resolution. An idea of how I would like it to work, ideally, below.

Note that this version isn't integrated with XML deposit. This is because it turns out that most pieces of third-party software do not have support to change their deposit endpoint.

"The moral of Kate’s picture-editing debacle is simple: the royal family should tell all" - the Guardian

Nah. The "moral" is that we should abandon the ultra-expensive bootlicking, prurient, soap opera charade of the monarchy - me

Is there a book that someone could recommend that does a good job of charting the history of the evolution of healthcare provision in post-WW2 North America/USA?

I still remember the senior lady at hospital a year or so ago who was outraged by her appointment wait. In anger she snapped "we should move to an insurance system".

But if we did, she wouldn't be covered. It's an existing condition now. And I suspect she had no idea of costs.

On the assumptions that 1. I might be able to stand/walk by then and 2. that this gig is outside so I can keep a safe distance, this looks amazing.

One of the best things about the TNG episode "The Inner Light" is how it apparently takes Picard a lifetime to learn to play a tune -- the Skye Boat Song -- that most beginners would pick up on descant recorder *within the actual length of the episode*.

Received a thank you email this morning for a blog post I wrote in 2012 (a list of the Greek terms in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory). You never know who will find and value this mode of writing.

Robyn has learned that when I call her, she gets a treat once she sits in front of me. So she's now taken to sitting in front of me whether I've called or not 🤣

Chronic pain measured as cardiac stress/heart rate variability in Garmin. Just suffering the pain of rheumatoid arthritis looks like I've run some iron man event or something.

Rapid Access Chest Pain Clinics are meant to see patients within two weeks, to try to prevent angina becoming a heart attack but waiting times are up to 6 months - Private Eye 1618

Let's say that I didn't want to wait up to 2 years, not being able to walk and in constant pain, how much do you think a private hip replacement costs for a patient with complex recovery needs? (dialysis)

It's £19k.