TLDNR

Wednesday, 3 August 2022

Owing to a mysterious disaster and inept use of backups, I lost my
"sent" file and all of rec.arts.sf.fandom, and didn't notice either
until it was far too late to retrieve them.

I moped around for a few weeks hoping that I would think of something,
then restarted rec.arts.sf.fandom from scratch. I found that my
provider's retention goes all the way back to 2013, though many
messages scrolled off before I could read them.

Lots of these old messages are interesting, particularly those from
Dorothy, and I don't want to mark them all read by downloading new
headers. It was only a few days ago that I started reading messages
from 2014. We were a talkative bunch back then, and there were more
long civil threads.

yesterday I packed a go bag. talk later, sew now!

Wednesday, 10 August 2022

Talk later, feed the cat and go to bed now.

Sunday, 14 August 2022

Couldn't find said go bag this morning. Luckily, I had a list of its
contents. It will turn up when I'm not desperate to get dressed and
get out.

I must re-organize my medical-appointment go bag by Wednesday.

I hope I can remember what I meant to say when I finally get time to
write.

I'm up to April 2014 now. I thought I could read the recent posts on
Google Groups, but I lack the time to puzzle out their interface.

Wednesday 17 August 2022

Go-bag organized and in car. Pity I have no time to talk about it.

Friday, 19 August 2022

Trip went well -- I'm released for normal activity, and we were home
about the time we usually get up.

Still no time to write, but I washed clothes this morning, and got a
bit of sewing done in the afternoon.

Thursday, 25 August 2022

I'm now reading 2015. Have a lot to say about it, but no time to say
it.

Partly because another computer disaster (two fried capacitors) and
failure to keep backups fresh have made updating my diaryzine and my
sewing blog take 120% of the available time, and my Web sites aren't
being maintained at all.

I seem to have been a much more-active poster eight years ago.

Monday, 5 September 2022

Can't sleep, don't remember what I wanted to say.

Original go-bag remark referred to the purse I take to church. I got
tired of arriving at the church to find that I'd forgotten my keys or
some other essential, and started a checklist.

(Yesterday, despite the checklist, I had to go back for my phone after
trying to check the time when I crossed the bridge, and when I needed
the nail clippers attached to the Sunday key ring, I found that I'd
forgotten the keys.)

While composing the checklist I realized that most of the stuff in the
purse could be left in it from one Sunday to the next, and it's on the
list grouped under "already in purse".

I have two go bags for medical appointments. When they told me that I
might want to bring a lunch to my Mohs surgery early in July, I
switched from the attaché case to the Trafalgar carry-on, and never
switched back.

They got the cancer on the first pass. (Even with the magnifying
mirror I bought to change dressings with, I can't find the scar to put
sunscreen on it, and just smear the general area.) The only hardship
was being forbidden to ride my bike for the rest of July and half of
August. Having to drive the car every time I went farther than I
could walk was pretty close to house arrest.

I'm reading September 2015.

Tuesday, 6 September 2022

Reading February 2016

Wednesday, 14 September 2022

Being short of time wastes a lot of time. I have to open
shoppinglists.txt this morning and search through my bag of canned cat
food, because I haven't yet found time to mark them "X" and "O" for
"Doesn't have juice for morning medication" and "has juice for morning
medication".

Can't do it this morning because I have to leave the house before ten.

Friday,16 September 2022

Marked 'em, haven't yet put them in order in the cupboard.

Leafing through unread posts, the subject line "Our human right to
self defense" caught my eye.

Pbbbbt! *Everything* has a right to self defense. A rock can't
exercise that right, but if a chip flies into your eye while you're
drilling a hole for a charge of dynamite, you can't blame the rock.

If something you're trying to kill bites your leg off, you've no call
to set off on a crazed campaign of vengeance.

Thursday 22 September 2022

I'm stuck in July of 2017, reading a 702-post thread that I started.

I seem to have been more provocative back then.

Wednesday 28 September 2022

6 April 2018, and I'm still provoking long threads. Only forty-two
posts this time.

Thursday 29 September 2022

Each year takes a little less time to read than the previous one.

And not because I'm skipping more; it takes fewer page downs to get
from one year to the next.

Monday, October 2022

> Subject: Filk
> Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2018 19:17:46 -0300

Only eighteen replies, most of them about the definition of "filk".

I think I come down on the side of those who would restrict "filk" to
a particular sub-genre of contrefait, but how could I use _contrefait_
as a subject line when I can't spell it?

Upon reading it half a decade later, I'm impressed that I posted

Never start your Roomba
When the cook is in the kitchen
There'll be plenty of time for sweeping
When the eating's done

confident that people would recognize the tune by the scansion alone
-- and most of them did.

Of course it would have been polite to mention the name and author of
the original, but I didn't have that information.

> --
> Joy Beeson
> joy beeson at comcast dot net

I don't know whether to be surprised that it was that long ago that we
fought free of Comcast (the final straw was a "security update" that
turned out to be a trojan), or that it was that recently.

Friday, 7 October 2022

Beginning to read 2018

Monday 10 October 2022

I found time to count the number of page downs it took to see each
year.

2013, beginning in April: 30
2014: 21
2015: 15
2016: 16
2017: 19
2018: 14
2019: 11
2020: 12
2021: 7
First five months of 2022: 3

So what happened in 2014?

Wednesday, 12 October 2022

Now starting 2020. Should move quickly now, since I read a lot of the
remaining posts soon after their headers were downloaded.

A few screens back, discussion turned to what to say when someone
demands "your pronouns". One person said "Thee, thou, and thy".

I'd be tempted to say "That was an offensive question, but I'll
pretend that I didn't hear it so we can start over."

As for why it's offensive, that's a long essay I don't choose to spend
any of my remaining ~84,400 hours writing.

Thursday, 13 October 2022

Just as I was saying "Hey, I'm pretty sure I spent March collecting
mask patterns, and undressing into the washing machine and taking a
shower every time I came back to the house. Where's all the fussing
and feathering?"

And the very next post was "Effect of Covid" on March the third.

Saturday 15 October 2022

I've reached a bit of flurry over my first Mohs Surgery in May, 2020.
That was a cancer on my nose where excision had failed more than once,
and it had dug in so deep that I had to have skin grafts afterward.

The second cancer, which came off in July 2022, had been around for
years because I thought it was a skin tag. I casually mentioned it to
the practioner doing my annual skin exam and she said that'e not a
skin tag and took a biopsy. I flunked the biopsy and I was driven to
Fort Wayne with a sack lunch in my go bag. (Hey! On-topic for the
thread!) They got it on the first pass and we were home before we
usually get up. The hole was smaller than the head of one of my
glass-head pins, a tad larger than the heads of my silk pins. (About
the same diameter, but the heads are shaped like nail heads: flat
disks.)

No restrictions on activities, (except for "being a lazy bum" the
first two days), but changing a dressing on an eyelid every day for
six weeks is a *bummer*.

Now Dave is scheduled for Mohs on his lip. He's apt to fall asleep
in the recliner, and I often find him asleep in his office chair, so
having to keep the wound elevated probably won't deprive him of sleep.

And there will be some *clearance* when he changes the dressing.

Don't grow up in Florida or Texas.

Wednesday 19 October 2022

"Stocking Up" is pretty close to on topic for "Go Bags".

The first consideraton is to stock up on things that you will need
when you are too sick to shop.

I did moderately well.

The west end of the top shelf in the pantry cupboard is piled to the
ceiling with boxes of nose tissue -- and I haven't come close to
emptying any of those that were already down and open.

Consumption of toilet paper and paper towels also goes up if one uses
both for nose tissue. (Paper towels don't go all to lint in one's
pocket, and toilet paper can be flushed.)

Joy Beeson <jbeeson@invalid.net.invalid> wrote:
> I figured that when the cable was repaired, I'd have lots of Fandom
> to catch up with, but there were very few posts, and many days pass
> without any. Is r.a.sf.f dead?

Not dead. By my count, there have been 920 rasff posts by 53 people
so far in 2022. And that doesn't count people in my killfile.

Things have been relatively quiet for the past couple years due to
fewer cons, which in turn is due to covid.

People whose opinions I trust say that Twitter is certain to soon
unrecoverably crash, due to its new owner firing half the employees,
then giving a "pep talk" which caused most of the best remaining
technical employees to quit. And even if it doesn't crash,
advertisers -- the source of 99% of its income -- are fleeing
it like the Titanic. When it fails, rasff will get many of its
fannish refugees.
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.

On Sun, 20 Nov 2022 13:52:05 -0000 (UTC), "Keith F. Lynch"
<kfl@KeithLynch.net> wrote:

---snip---

>People whose opinions I trust say that Twitter is certain to soon
>unrecoverably crash, due to its new owner firing half the employees,
>then giving a "pep talk" which caused most of the best remaining
>technical employees to quit. And even if it doesn't crash,
>advertisers -- the source of 99% of its income -- are fleeing
>it like the Titanic. When it fails, rasff will get many of its
>fannish refugees.

I wonder how many of the Twitterati have even heard of Usenet, let alone want
a Twitter "alternative" whare you can't post pictures or video...

And no, I don't have a Twitter account!

Alan Woodford

The Greying Lensman

On 11/20/22 8:52 AM, Keith F. Lynch wrote:
> Joy Beeson <jbeeson@invalid.net.invalid> wrote:
>> I figured that when the cable was repaired, I'd have lots of Fandom
>> to catch up with, but there were very few posts, and many days pass
>> without any. Is r.a.sf.f dead?
>
> Not dead. By my count, there have been 920 rasff posts by 53 people
> so far in 2022. And that doesn't count people in my killfile.
>
> Things have been relatively quiet for the past couple years due to
> fewer cons, which in turn is due to covid.
>
> People whose opinions I trust say that Twitter is certain to soon
> unrecoverably crash, due to its new owner firing half the employees,
> then giving a "pep talk" which caused most of the best remaining
> technical employees to quit. And even if it doesn't crash,
> advertisers -- the source of 99% of its income -- are fleeing
> it like the Titanic. When it fails, rasff will get many of its
> fannish refugees.

A lot of people are fleeing to Mastodon, though they may not understand
its distributed model. I can be found at https://liberdon.com/@gmcgath

--
Gary McGath http://www.mcgath.com