Rubenerd

This podcast by the Scientific American was titled You Can’t Fix Burnout With Self-Care. I left the episode with almost more questions than answers, surprisingly enough.

One of the co-authors Shayla Love concludes:

After thinking about it, I’ve decided that as far as frameworks go for understanding our frustrations, exhaustion and malaise, I can think of worse ones. And that’s because burnout, as it was originally conceived, is a social problem. It’s not that you are tired of parenting or volunteering for no reason. It’s probably because you’re not getting enough help, you don’t feel like you’re making an impact and you’re not in control of your schedule or what you’re doing. You can’t take on the job of feeling better all by yourself. We need help, and we need to help each other.

That last line broadly matches the sentiment of one of her guests, Anthony Montgomery from Northumbria University:

The most important part of burnout is that it’s about yourself, but it’s also about others.

They’re right, of course. The painful irony of burnout is that so many suffer from it, but they do so alone. Only by tackling our circumstances, and working together with the people in our professional and personal lives, can we hope to make a meaningful and lasting difference. We’re all in this together, to borrow a cliché.

But this is where my own lived experience differs slightly from what these clearly far more qualified people prescribe. In fact, the way I treated my last major burnout was specifically self-care. I took a break from work, got a hotel in the mountains (well, what passes as mountains in Australia), and communed with nature for a fortnight. I worried at the time that I was attempting to escape my problems, but I did came back more motivated to change things. Some of the behaviours I adopted after this have helped me a lot with where I stand today. The race is long, as the Sunscreen Song says, but in the end, it’s only with yourself.

A dear friend I’ve talked with fairly recently went through their own burnout, only their fortnight was a year. They raised the point that some see burnout like toast; namely, you can’t unburn it, or turn it back into bread. But you can scrape off some off the char, and make something nice out of it. They were just trying to figure out what that looked like for them.

Sometimes I do walk into work or family commitments feeling a bit like toast, so clearly there’s more work to do. Maybe I need to take more of that collaborative approach to addressing the problem, as Shayla and Anthony describe.

I’ve talked a lot here about how I’ve given up on music streaming services, though the same mostly applies for video. Streaming platforms give artists a pittance, they revoke even purchased material on a whim, and you can’t have local copies. They’re a bad deal for everyone but the distributor, and I’d rather spend my money elsewhere.

The latest example of this is Funimation, the streaming platform that promised in their FAQ that online Digital Copies of their optical discs would be available forever. The validity of such a claim is already dubious; up there with unlimited, 100% uptime, and Rubenerd Certified. But even by the fast-and-loose standards of modern advertising and customer contracts, this was destined to fail.

And it did! Funimation was recently brought under the same corporate umbrella as Crunchyroll, which have no intention of honouring these customer agreements:

Please note that Crunchyroll does not currently support Funimation Digital copies, which means that access to previously available digital copies will not be supported.

Also note the use of the term currently, a popular tactic by service providers to imply they may support something at some indeterminate point. Without a concrete timeline or commitment in writing, it’s fluff.

This is yet another cautionary tale about purchasing music and shows from online services. Any site that doesn’t let you immediately download and archive without DRM is a rental, irrespective of how much you pay, or what assurances you’re given. Your access to what you bought is completely at the discretion of a business who’s incentives and motivations are not aligned with yours.

It’s high time these streaming platforms be held to account for this sort of behaviour. Isn’t there a financial term for entering into a business transaction with terms you have no intention (or capacity) to honour?

From our favourite artist Mika Pikazo herself:

Alear will be a figure from “Fire Emblem Engage”. I drew her congratulatory illustration and comments, the reproduction and power is amazing…!

I posted about her incredible game art last year. I think the sculptors did an amazing job, right down to her billowing hear and the detail on her sleeves.

It’s a dangerous time for someone trying to get rid of stuff.

Speaking of models I only just came across this artist’s 3D printable model ship collection, and they look incredible.

If you subscribe to their Patreon, they give you access to their detailed models you can 3D print yourself, or give to someone to do properly. They even has designs optimised for resin, my favourite material after seeing how well it worked on a recent 8-bit Apple component.

I harboured—HAH!—an Olympic—HAH!—obsession with ocean liners as a kid. I can’t remember if it started with James Cameron’s movie or my interest in Art Deco design, but I amassed a huge collection of books about them. Visiting the RMS Queen Mary in Longbeach with Clara was a childhood dream come true.

Unfortunately, my attempts at building model Airfix ships have thus far not gone well, despite my best efforts. Maybe something a small, 3D-printed model I can paint would be the answer!

The only question is: which one? I always thought the Lusitania was the most beautiful and gracious, though the Olympic always had those clean lines.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a doctor or pharmacist, and this post is not medical advice. Speak to a qualified health care professional if you have any questions or concerns.

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Now here’s a niche topic! But it’s something I had to deal with today.

The genes that gifted me blogging prowess, rugged attractiveness, and self-delusion also saddled me with unusually-narrow nasal passages. It’s not life threatening, but it makes anything but mild congestion excruciating, like I’m continuously snorting wasabi, and without the benefit of some nice sashimi on the side.

Pseudoephedrine works for this, extremely well. With Clara and my sister as witnesses, I’ve cried from relief after taking it during especially acute episodes. K-On! had a lot of very a-cute episodes. That reminds me, I’m long overdue talking about BOCCHI. But I digress.

Pseudoephedrine used to be the active ingredient in most off-the-shelf decongestants in Australia, until we were told certain parties discovered they could make narcotics from it. This lead to it being a controlled substance, meaning there are certain hoops one must jump through to get access. Gymnastics moves are difficult enough are they are now, let alone when one is ill.

To get around the restriction, decongestant tablets sold in Australia made the switch to phenylephrine, a drug that sounds like something you’d make bottles from. Wait no, that’s polypropylene. I may as well have chewed plastic though, because boxes from three manufacturers did absolutely nothing. They even failed as placebos; I was fully primed to accept relief when I saw the familiar packaging, not knowing at the time it was a reformulation.

An American Food and Drug Administration panel since confirmed that phenylephrine taken orally does nothing. Specifically, the active ingredient is metabolised before it reaches your nose. This was validating; no wonder it did sweet FA. Not to be confused with Fa… or should it?

If that’s the case, is a phrase with four words. Why is an ineffective substitute being pushed on people without their knowledge? The packaging of these tablets, the shelves, and pharmacy staff either don’t mention the difference, or aren’t allowed to. People are going to pharmacies in their hour of need, presumably in a lot of pain and stress, and are leaving with expensive salt tablets.

I understand there are risks associated with certain medicines. Here comes the proverbial posterior prognostication: but… the key word is informed consent. Substituting a substandard medicine is one thing, but an entirely ineffective one strikes me as especially cynical. And while we’re on the subject of legality, whatever happened to false advertising, and duty of care? The stuff doesn’t work.

I knew from experience and research that I could go to a counter and ask for a pseudoephedrine-based decongestant with my government ID and a proof of address. It helps when you’re muffling coughs and sniffles under a mask too, though presumably that’s optional. But what if you don’t know this? There are no signs anywhere telling you.

My heart goes out to people suffering at home with those crappy tablets. It’s not just you, they’re really not doing anything.

Back in October last year I ended my Gemini-style link experiment, and went back to using inline links. Look at that, I’ve done two already! From the latter post:

I’m going back to inline links, but I’m making sure each link has alt text. I should have been doing that already for accessibility, but this way I can always render them out into their own section if I end up doing a Gemini (or Gopher) site as well.

James Savage, who has among the coolest names ever, asked on Mastodon if I had any best practice references when it came to using title attributes. Easy, I thought! But then I went digging.

I had always assumed title attributes were meant to match the destination page title, with optional information added if required for context. But was this codified anywhere, or did I just pick it up years ago and take it as rote?

Reading the XHTML 1.1 specification—the last one I ever read in any great detail—we’re told a in the Hypertext Module inherits the Common set of attributes, which includes the Core set, of which one is title. All the specification mentions is that it contains CDATA, which is about as helpful as your parents telling you a present was smaller than a breadbox.

The HTML5 “Living Standard” has a section on the a element, which says Global Attributes apply, one of which is title. It says this at the time of writing, emphasis added:

The title attribute represents advisory information for the element, such as would be appropriate for a tooltip. On a link, this could be the title or a description of the target resource

This gets closer to what I’d long assumed; the title attribute is the title of the target page. But could is vaguer than I remember.

Clara and I maintain a retro webserver with pages written in HTML 3.2 for a bit of fun, and maybe as form of silly protest for what the modern web has become. I link to the gloriously grokkable HTML 3.2 Specification there, so I checked out what it had to say.

title An advisory title for the linked resource.

Well then!

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One thing I’ve been reminded of from reading these, especially the HTML5 Standard, is that titles are no accessibility panacea themselves. While screen readers may use them to aid those with limited visibility, and those on desktops get a nice tooltop describing the target page, people on capacitive-touch mobile miss out. It still probably makes sense for the visible text of the link itself to be meaningful.

As for what constitutes a good title, I think it still makes sense to use the original title, though maybe with the target site’s name also included if it isn’t in the original.

Diedrick responded to my post about audio cassettes with a story of his own adventures with these carts, this time in retrocomputers.

When the cassette player was replaced with a dedicated data recorder the situation improved somewhat, but fact of the matter is tapes were slow (almost 5 minutes to load a full game of 48K) and they couldn’t seek, which meant that for every recording of software or data file we had to write down the position, indicated by a counter that we had to reset after fully rewinding the tape. Forgetting that cost more time.

I’ve played audio into my Apple //e and Commodore machines for the thrill of doing something new and unusual to me, but I can absolutely see where this would become tedious and painful quickly. Tapes as a storage medium were clearly a stopgap until disk drives could become more affordable. I agree with him, best to skip the tapes for anything other than idle curiosity.

He also raises cartridges, and the ephemeral state of modern software:

The thing is, apart from the worst type of data storage in the history of consumer computing, these MSX machines also used the absolute most convenient way of software storage, to this day: the game cartridge. Just put it in a slot, turn on the computer and play. That’s it. As far as I’m aware, no console today can do that. Neither can Steam. Even better, my kids have a lot of fun with those cartridges, the very same I enjoyed forty years ago. No console today will be able to do that, forty years from now, simply because their content is online and will no longer be available.

I do count my lucky stars that I grew up in a time where the games I ran came on DOS disks. There are probably entire classes of mobile and web games now that today’s kids will never be able to experience again when they’re older. That’s kinda sad.

As for carts being a convenient mechanism, I think he’s hit the nail on the head. Aside from also being something tangible and more permanent, they’re also fun! It’s why I love that the Foenix F256K has such a socket. When finances make it possible, I can’t wait to get my hands on one.

Henry Belot reported something that’s just too good:

The Australian Tax Office has still not received a report by the law firm Linklaters, which was cited by PwC global’s executive last year to clear its international partners of any wrongdoing.

We did nothing wrong! We have a report that proves it! Oh it’s coming, don’t worry! Can you imagine if an employee tried this stunt on their boss?

Weirdly enough, I also have a report saying PwC owes my favourite cancer research charity and I one billion dollars. It’s 100% legit and absolutely, definitely exists. Trust me! To whom should I send bank details?

UPDATE: Evidently my brain still isn’t completely functional yet, on account of dmesg being in section 8, not section 1! Derp. Thanks to Simon Wheeler for pointing this out!

Completely out of the blue, these last couple of weeks have been some of the worst of my life! But as cliché as it sounds, things only being icky today feels wonderful. There’s something about perspective there.

Even family and mental health issues aside, I was struck down this week by the worst flu I’ve ever had; my first illness that topped COVID. My mum often talked about her chemo sore throats keeping her from sleeping, and now I know how. To put it into perspective, I’d rather have testicular surgery again.

Here comes the proverbial posterior prognostication: but… I managed to turn a corner last night, and today I feel fantastic. It’s as though the swallowfood service has started, and the breathe service got unstuck after having unmet boot dependencies. Being able to do these two things again without blinding pain is like appreciating a gift I always had, but took for granted.

I still don’t have resolution on a bunch of things that were taking up my mental health and time last week, and I’m still sick on the level of a bad cold, but weirdly enough having had this recent experience I feel like I can take the world on again. Take on… me?

I have two groups of people I want to thank! First, to the amazing people at the Chatswood Medical Practice, you kept my spirits up as much as you helped me with medicine, tests, and treatments. And a big thanks and a hug to those of you who sent messages. I appreciate some of you aren’t exactly doing well yourselves, and surprising nobody, I’ve yet to follow up with all of you for your kind words. But know that they meant a lot. ♡

Also, make sure you’re up to date with your flu shots. I can’t imagine how much worse this would have been if Clara and I didn’t keep obsessive records of what we’ve had and whether we’re due for another.

Sometimes blogging is a great distraction, but it’s getting tougher with all the family things and some more bad news.

See you again soon. Peace. ✌️