Dusting off

 So, my diabetes numbers are doing just great, thanks, I have now experienced the joys of colonoscopy, and oh yeah, Twitter has been bought by the worst billionaire. So I'm dusting off old places, and finding new ones (or at least new to me), because the guy is a complete waste of skin, and his fans are even worse. So this place is possibly going to see some posting action, I'm spinning up a Tumblr under my usual handle, and I'm shitposting to my weird little soul's content because Twitter isn't going to survive in a pre-buyout form.

An update

 So, it has been a While. Life has been tricky, between terror at four years under a government which openly desired my death for multiple reasons, getting a kid through the early stages of a school system I don't fully understand, and the whole pandemic thing. We're finally starting to come out of that, though, and then when I finally managed to get my blood tests done (and there were plenty; it felt like they took a full unit, split up among the various vials) I got a thoroughly unwelcome surprise: I am now diabetic. I don't know the full details yet, they haven't had me in for the initial inspection and "welcome to diabetes" appointment (and won't for another couple of weeks, which is both annoying and comforting, as it says I'm not in danger of imminent death), but the figures are plenty stark; my fasting blood glucose is far higher than it ought to be, my A1C is in the range of concern, and honestly, this explains how bad the skin on my feet has been lately and why I've been constantly peeing, so I'm not going to claim they must have misinterpreted. No, I will be going in with a checklist, a notebook, and a refusal to leave until I've received referrals to a dietitian, a pain management specialist, and until I'm satisfied that I understand what's going on.

In the meantime, I have given up sugared soda (which is somewhat annoying, as I still had most of a case of genuine Irn-Bru in the fridge and that stuff is sugary as hell), I have reevaluated my carbohydrate intake, and I'm working on walking more. Ultimately, this is most definitely an Embuggerance, but it is an Embuggerance I can live with. I shall be working on slowly decreasing my weight (crash dieting is almost certainly a Bad Idea) and learning what I can and can't do.

I do wish I had my little miniature panther to help me through this, but alas, time has had its way with her and she is no longer with us. We may want to consider taking on a dog instead, as a means of forcing me to go out and walk around.

We don't blame the guns.

We don’t blame the guns. We blame the shitty culture that equates gun ownership with masculinity and virtue; which tells boys that real men express their emotions through violence; which casts asking for help as unmanly; and which casts fear as equivalent to respect. We blame the shitty laws which make guns easier to buy than decongestant medication; the industry lobbyists who spend millions of dollars to dissuade those elected to represent us from enacting our overwhelmingly popular desire for better regulation of the availability of guns; the advertising which makes guns into fashion items; the fiction which portrays use of guns as a trivial matter, rather than a decision to kill another human. We blame the disingenuous assertion that our desire for better regulation is equivalent to a desire for confiscation; the unremitting calls to wait after every single massacre as the drumbeat of death becomes background noise; the constant focus on finding excuses for the person who made a decision to kill other people; the transparently wrong-headed propaganda claiming that we can do nothing but buy our own guns.

We don’t blame the guns. We blame the attitude that someone bent on murder will find a way to murder, so it’s pointless to put any obstacles between them and the tools for maximally efficient murder.

My life with pain

Pain is a very interesting subject to write about. People are often confused by it and the terminology surrounding it, so let's open with some definitions.

Pain threshold is when someone starts to feel pain. Some people will fail to notice an injury that would immediately incapacitate someone else. As a chronic pain sufferer, people assume I have a high pain threshold, but that's not the case. If anything, it's low.

Pain tolerance is how much pain someone can tolerate. This is where I have an extraordinarily high stat; I can ignore a LOT of pain. Mainly because I've had to, since to the best of my recollection I last had a full day without pain... sometime in 1995. More than half my life ago. And even then, days like that were rare exceptions.

It's the economy, stupid.

We've all encountered the person who says climate change can't be happening, the planet isn't getting warmer, because it's cold right now. I'm pretty sure we all know that that's a result of an overly simplistic understanding of what climate is, how it works, and we know that they're thoroughly wrong.

 Now, President Obama is handing over the strongest economy in ages - but Trump's voters are convinced the economy's wrecked, and Trump can fix it. Why is that?

The Prison Problem

In the news today, the US Department of Justice has announced that it intends to end its use of privately-run, for-profit prisons. There has been much rejoicing, but though this does represent a great step forward, offsetting the great retrograde step of using the damn things in the first place, it does not solve the underlying structural problem with the USA's system of incarceration.

The country I left is gone.

In voting to exit the European Union, the British electorate have killed my homeland. A manifestly imperfect homeland, but a land which strove to be welcoming, to learn from the new people it met. A land which acknowledged its bloody past as Not What We Ought To Have Done. The hope I knew has been swept away in a stream of fear, and of exploitation of that fear for personal gain. The recriminations have begun; Scotland now demands another plebiscite, so that they at least may escape the folly of the English. People who voted to leave now profess remorse, claiming that they did not expect to actually win. The pound, once an exemplar of a strong currency, wilts in the heat of uncertainty. London's financial engines falter, and Calais demands an end to the cooperative arrangement which made popping over to France a trivial matter for those within a few hours of the Channel Tunnel. The Troubles are about to re-emerge, worse than they ever were because everybody thought we had things sorted out; Northern Ireland wishes to remain within the EU, within the group which acts as guarantor of its first run of peace in a century.

The United Kingdom is united no longer, and the land I grew up in, with all its flaws, is dead, killed by ignorance, xenophobia, and lies. Oh ye who now tread the soil of the British Isles, walk softly; for you walk upon the grave of my first home.