eponymous-rose

[eponymous-rose]

A little Clara health update (all positive, but under the cut for mention of other pet illness/death!):

Clara has a heart murmur and what looks like possibly some very very mild HCM, and ever since that was discovered about 4 years ago, she has to go in for an echocardiogram every 1-1.5 years. Yesterday was echo #3, and it went so well!!

It now looks like the thickening they thought might be a possible HCM indicator actually is just normal variation (her values dropped into the normal range for the first time, and even at their highest were never more than 3mm over the high end of normal). They did extensive scanning yesterday and aren't seeing any signs of progression! This is such great news - we needed more data points to confirm that this may not even be HCM at all, and that seems to be the case.

She has a murmur, but it looks like it's likely benign and just due to the stress of vet visits (for this visit, she had to be at the vet's office from 7:30 AM to 4 PM, which you can imagine ramped her up pretty badly). We know she's very prone to vet stress - her BP hit 160 systolic yesterday (and was 170 at her last visit!), but when I was there a couple months ago and we measured it in a quiet room with the vet tech cuddling her it came up as 120 - so this isn't really a surprise. Despite the heart murmur, her heart is functioning totally normally at this time and it seems like everything is very stable.

Moving forward, they still want to scan her every year just in case - I get the impression they're so excited at actually catching all of this stuff so early that any medication interventions she may need are likely to be really, really effective. If the murmur winds up giving her trouble or the thickening turns out to recur and actually indicate HCM, there are medications out there that she will likely respond really well to. She's six years old now and her heart is functioning normally with no negative change (and some positive change!) in the four years we've been monitoring. This is likely something she will die with rather than die of, which has always been my goal!

One of the reasons why I've been so worked up about this is that her littermate, Hector, had the discovery of a heart murmur at his first vet appointment that wound up revealing an inoperable hole in his heart that had already done enough damage at 7 months old that he went into heart failure and sadly passed away two months later - the only reason he lived as long and as mostly asymptomatically as he did is because of the medication they put him on. Hearing the vet say "has anyone ever noticed this heart murmur?" about Clara less than a year after losing Hector was devastating, and now that we have enough data to show that her prognosis is actually good? It's such a relief.

She then came home and, wobbly on gabapentin, tried to hop up on the windowsill and landed squarely in her water bowl.

Can't wait to have many more years of silliness with this little cat!

[eponymous-rose]

Okay, I updated this! To enable being able to include more games, I only included my favorite of each franchise.

Mass Effect Series: This was the series that got me back into gaming - I played various games as a kid (see later in this list) but mostly stopped in high school/college. I had picked up the first two games when they were on sale for $5 apiece, and then in summer 2011 I was doing a NASA internship and feeling Things about space and decided to jump in on the first game. Loved it so much that I eventually even bought a mouse for it (played all of 1 and most of 2 on a trackpad.....). ME3 gets the spot on the list because the multiplayer is the reason I have one of the greatest groups of friends I've ever made - it's the reason the last five years have included such amazing moments as watching Eurovision in a hotel room in the Netherlands, hiking in the Rockies, watching a comedy show at Second City, exploring Antelope Canyon, stargazing in the middle of the Pacific, snorkeling with manta rays at nighttime, kayaking at Cape Cod at sunset... and watching approximately a bajillion amazing movies every Saturday night. Truly life-changing in so many ways.

Dragon Age Series: While it hasn't quite clicked the way ME did, this series has had some amazing moments that have really stuck with me over the years. I'm currently playing through Veilguard for the first time and... really, really having a great time?????

Baldur's Gate III: Man. What can I say? I played a bunch of this and still randomly seek out other people's first-time playthroughs to watch. I think about it all the time. D&D to video games will always be a lossy transition, but IMO this is as good as it gets. So much love and attention went into this game and it shows!

Titanfall 2: WHY WAS THIS SO GOOD. The movement, the inexplicably stunning campaign, the endlessly fun multiplayer... just wildly imaginative and pushing the boundaries of what games can do, and making it incredibly fun to explore those boundaries along the way. Nothing feels quite like playing this game.

The Witcher 3: I kinda don't want to like this game as much as I do, just because the fans are so obnoxious and I'm well aware of all its multitudinous flaws, but I've played the whole thing to 100% completion twice (once on highest difficulty) with all the DLC, hitting all those dang Skellige question-marks, and it never failed to astonish me how incredibly intricate some of the little side quests wound up being. Both DLCs vastly outstrip the main game for me, too - Hearts of Stone did some incredibly transformative stuff, and Blood and Wine was gorgeous and basically a complete game in its own right. Not only did this game make me care about Gruff Male Protagonist, it made me seek out the books (admittedly a mixed bag) and I actually really enjoyed Witcher 2 as well. Cannot wait for the next game.

Horizon: Zero Dawn: I haven't actually played the second one yet, but I really enjoyed this one - please assume that any console games on this list must truly be exceptional, because I find playing with a controller to be a universally miserable experience normally. Super-fun story, gorgeous world to explore, but I also really enjoyed the gameplay loop.

Transistor: All the Supergiant games should really be here, but the vibes and music for Transistor were immaculate, and I suspect I'd really gel with the tropes more ten years later than I did on my first playthrough. Look out for a replay on stream of this one soon!

Uncharted Series: I had a great time with this series (again, despite having to touch a controller to do so). Give me humor and Claudia Black and I'll have a good time!

Spider-Man: Man, I need to get caught up on DLC/sequels/etc. for this one! I had a really, really good time just swinging around NYC, and I'm a fan of this particular brand of open-world (see also H:ZD, which is a similar kind of model). Easy to get pulled into a 100% playthrough!

Tales from the Borderlands: Look, I don't know! I got really invested in the characters and had an amazing time.

Thomas was Alone: I'll mark this as emblematic of my early-2010s fascination with odd little indie games. Super fun gameplay and a weirdly affecting story!

FTL: Faster Than Light: This was my go-to killing-time game for like a decade - I installed an endless mode mod and just dove in. Super fun gameplay loop!

Hades: Another Supergiant offering - this is another game that just feels great to play. The skill increase is so tangible as you Get Good, and the roguelike elements made for infinite replay value (I only stopped once I got the proper epilogue, and by then I was cool with not 100%ing everything). I've avoided watching anything about the sequel and am excited for the full launch, whenever that is!

Portal Series: Another game I played that first year of getting back into games, and it was just really fun and such a great entrance to the world of what was possible in modern gaming.

Stardew Valley: I never got super into completing things in this game, but it's the epitome of cozy gaming for me and I'll still break it out occasionally on an airplane.

Super Smash Bros Melee: My brother and I had a GameCube when I was early in college and my brother was still in high school, and every time I came home we'd play this or Mario Kart Double Dash. Sooooo many hours of trolling with Kirby. So many.

Mario Kart 8: I've played so many Karts over the years (from the original on my cousin's system at family gatherings, to Double Dash with my brother, and beyond...), but this one makes the list because I am having such a blast playing with @loquaciousquark and @silksieve (and @fistfulofgammarays, when we physically trap him in the room to play with us!). The drama and high-stakes are neverending, and the blue shells are forever bullshit.

Split Fiction: Played through this with @loquaciousquark recently and it was such a treat! The casual, almost blasé rapid-fire creativity of the level design reminded me a lot of Titanfall 2 and some of the indie games that got me back into gaming. Split-screen co-op at its best!

XCOM: Enemy Unknown: Every Christmas, my brother and I would try to play at least a little bit of XCOM. We get way too invested in the interchangeable characters, which resulted in wild moments like our star soldier freaking out during a high-pressure escort mission and just straight-up shooting the dignitary in the face???? Love a good strategy game, and this is a fun one to jump right back into because messing up feels so funny.

Pokemon Yellow: I'm just gonna say that this franchise permanently messed with my brain chemistry at a young age and the repercussions are only now becoming clear. My brother and I had a Yellow ROM hack on our home computer and played it endlessly when his friends came over. Great times all around! Anyway, haha, I'm definitely still not into Pokemon! Pay no attention to my graded Japanese and English Moonbreons!

3D Movie Maker: Now we're into the deep lore. My brother and I got this game when it came out in 1995 and we were OBSESSED. You could create videos and animations using a set of stock models and animation loops. It's the first time I can remember downloading user content for a game online (you could get movies other people had made!) and it's the origin of half of my inside jokes with my brother because you could record your own voice lines and BOY DID WE.

SimTunes: Objectively the best sim game. Why wasn't this a bigger thing? The gameplay involved little musical-instrument bugs that would make various tones or sounds when they passed over pixels of different colors. The goal was to make beautiful pixel-art that also played complicated and coherent music. We got this game in 1996 and played it to death. I still have some of the songs stuck in my head.

Age of Empires Series: We started with the first game and played through AoE 3 - this was such a great intro to RTS. I built custom levels, never played online (in college, I watched a friend play online and was HORRIFIED at the pace with which she approached it), and challenged myself with silly things like "we're all on islands and I'll disable any nautical technology for everyone but me so we can just take our time to build giant metropolises that I will eventually come by and stomp on" or "this one priest is going to win me the whole thing".

Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit: This isn't the other Need for Speed 3, this is the one from the late 90s. I played so much of this... I spent so much time on this game that for a while all my relatives would buy me Lamborghini model kits for my birthday. While I have since abandoned any interest in cars, this sparked my love for racing games!

Roller Coaster Tycoon: I blame @loquaciousquark for bringing it up again in 2025 - I loved this game as a kid, but getting back into it as an adult and realizing how incredibly well it's held up has given me a whole new appreciation. When I was on my big train trip this summer from Seattle to Chicago, I played it in my little sleeping-car room and it was such a delight.

This just in: video games good, maybe???????

[eponymous-rose]

Summertime Clara: no thoughts, only fluff and sun.

[eponymous-rose]

My Trip Home, or: The Plane Design that Fails at Triangles

I fly fairly often. I offer that as context - I'm not jetting off somewhere glamorous every week or two, and I'm not even spending every second weekend in a hotel yelling business words at people in suits, but I'm lucky enough that, between a few work travels a year and a couple fun travels a year and now this strange new world of hobby travel, the shine of even my sickeningly optimistic and perpetually delighted perspective on air travel has begun to tarnish. "Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth!" Yeah, and then promptly discovered the surlier bonds of budget air travel.

(This will be a post of incredibly petty complaints!)

I was in California this weekend for a hobby thing, and I was flying the kind of non-refundable, lowest-budget ticket for which the gate announcement is an afterthought. Very "...and the rest" from that first iteration of the Gilligan's Island theme song. Right? We all know this incredibly topical reference. So, alongside the Professor and Mary-Anne, I schlep to my seat and find myself in the window seat in my least favorite of all seat configurations: the 3 seat-aisle-3 seat combo on board the Boeing 737-700.

I shuffle across the two people who paid for a refundable, normal ticket (and hence boarded approximately seventeen years ago), and sit down, ready for my two-hour flight. And promptly think, "Oh no."

For context, my height and weight approximate those of the median American human across all genders. My butt occupies about two-thirds to three-quarters of the seat. I am not especially tall nor especially short. I say this to communicate that I would, reasonably I think, expect people in a wide range of body types - including those several standard deviations outside of my own extremely median one - to be at least moderately comfortable in the seats aboard this extremely common aircraft. The bar is so low that Boeing engineers took that bar as inspiration for space-saving measures.

We all settle into our seats. We take off. The guy in front of me reclines his seat immediately. This is my line in the sand, my probably unreasonable stance that I will argue until the end of time: yes, you can recline on an airplane. No, I don't think you should. To me, reclining your seat falls under the same category as refusing to tip: yes, tipping is a terrible system and the proper response to unfair wages is for the employer to cover the shortfall, but hey, here we are in a reality where those tips are subsidizing fair (or at least legal) wages, and wouldn't you know it, in that reality you gotta participate in the flawed system as an individual to avoid being a jerk. So, yeah, you *can* recline your seat, and it's the airline's fault for smashing us all so close together that those couple inches of space mean you're either destroying someone's laptop, spilling their drink, or dreamily resting your head in their lap for the rest of the voyage, but that doesn't mean you're not a bit of a jerk for doing it. More on this in a sec, I promise you, but suffice it to say that the knees of my extremely median five-foot-seven legs are now lightly kissing the seat in front of me.

The first hurdle emerges in the form of the (genuinely very lovely) person sitting to my left. In the unspoken rule that is very loudly spoken anytime the subject is broached, the middle seat gets the armrests. This is well and good and one of the signal indicators to me of the social contract still being in place aboard an aircraft despite the abomination that is the seat recline. Here, we say to those objectively suffering the worst in our midst, partake of our bounty via these two plastic doohickeys. Lean ye thereupon and rejoice.

The trouble, of course, is triangles.

As an experiment at home, sit yourself down and imagine the wall of a seat in front of you. The armrests are positioned such that, if you let your arms rest down directly next to your ribs, your arms will be parallel with the rests. Now take out an imaginary phone or iPad or book - something that requires two hands to hold it. And remember, you've got your neighbor in your lap at this point and can't hold the device too far in front of you.

The result? Triangles! Your arms are no longer parallel with the arm rests. Your elbows are several inches over both arm rests, pressing directly into the ribs of the median persons to either side of you.

I generally expect a little bit of arm contact when sitting side-by-side with someone in a sardine can speeding through the air at frankly alarming speeds. I don't like it, but it's reasonable. What strikes me as unreasonable - and this has happened each time I've flown this model of plane lately - is having my neighbor touching my torso the entire flight. My torso! How often do you have prolonged contact between a stranger and your torso? Not often! Not often at all! It's deeply unpleasant!

The worst part is that there is absolutely nothing this woman could have done, short of sticking her arms directly forward and up the whole flight, to mitigate this problem. Miserably, we settled into a detente of her elbow in my ribs and mine jutting slightly into the space in front of her forearm. My body reacted to this strange and unwelcome experience by giving me a phantom sensation of being tickled in my left armpit. For two hours.

To distract myself, and for a change of pace, I brought down my tray table, which was approximately the dimensions of a typical sheet of paper. I tried putting my bottled beverage on it and found that whoever had designed the indentations that served as cup holders was perhaps confusing cups with, I dunno, acorns or something? They were very small. I gamely tried to eat the sandwich I'd brought on board, with the approximate range of motion of a full-body cast at my disposal.

A clunk on my toe: new stimulus for my tickled-out body to latch onto, delighted. The man in front of me had dropped his phone, and I was in a position to recover it! There are few things are immediately soul-restoring as being able to render a small service to a stranger.

Relieved, and under his nervous gaze back at me through the crack between his seat and the side of the plane, I managed to slide the phone toward me with my foot... and realized that, were I to try hinging at the waist to pick this phone up, I would end up giving this man a little smooch upon his forehead instead. I asked him to un-recline his seat so I could actually reach it, and managed, with my face completely crushed into the seat in front of me, breathing plastic and the safety information card all the way, to reach down and grab his phone. He thanked me and reclined once more.

Two hours later, we'd landed and the deplaning process had begun. The woman next to me asked if I was in a big hurry to make a connection or anything, but the way she actually worded the question was, "Are you in a hurry to get up?" and I genuinely wasn't sure how to communicate that I was both at my final destination and therefore wouldn't need to push past her to the front of the plane... and that I was at my metaphorical final destination and would probably spontaneously combust if I remained sitting for too much time. I just stared at her with very wobbly liquid eyes and she nodded and we stayed put, her elbow reassuringly in my ribs.

Having had the incredible experience of a cross-country Amtrak train trip across the US recently, I can now definitively say which mode of transport feels more like it was invented centuries ago. On the other hand, maybe all that time just gave trains what they needed to figure out the mystery of triangles.

[eponymous-rose]

What time is it, you ask? Why, it's silly little kitty time!!!

[eponymous-rose]

Just finished a 50-hour train ride from Washington to Illinois and at my destination I was met with exactly two types of responses:

"Wow, that sounds like so much fun, I've always wanted to try that, tell me everything!!"

(very seriously, very concerned) "You... you do know you could have done that in five hours by plane, right?"

[eponymous-rose]

What time is it, you ask? Why, it's silly little kitty time!!!

[eponymous-rose]

Karlach - Sun🧡 tarot card for @bg3tarotdeck I also have BlueSky now!

[eponymous-rose]

Annual checkup SUCCESS. Teeth look great, vaccines re-upped, and they even got a normal bp reading out of this incredibly skittish kittish!

We're continuing to monitor her heart murmur, but so far no signs of disease progression (and she's certainly subclinical and likely not in need of any heart meds for a good long while, if ever) - she'll be going in for her yearly screening echocardiogram in August. The last one showed zero change over 18 months, so fingers crossed the lack of trend continues. The only recommendation was to decrease the amount of kibble she gets, since she's about to hit double-digit pounds, which is a little heavy for her tiny kitty frame, and of course she gets an upset stomach if she doesn't eat a tiny meal every 8 hours, so I'm doing some 3D math trying to retrofit this auto-feeder to dispense smaller amounts of kibble than it already does on the minimum settings.

So happy to have had this goofball for over five years now and very much looking forward to many many more!!

[eponymous-rose]

Clara has such a typical PNW resident's reaction to sunny days

[eponymous-rose]

Some nice things happening today:

A really kind lady from my strength training class is just gifting me some workout equipment and I'm going to pick it up today! My plan is to grab a little gift for her at the store and leave it in its place

Grabbing a wonderful dinner with a wonderful friend!!!

My first PhD student is scheduling his defense and I can't believe he's almost at the finish line!

A schedule shift allowed me to sleep in today and I woke up to a lovely sunny morning and a little kitty sleeping happily in the crook of my elbow (and my smart watch telling me my sleep quality was "excellent", not to brag or anything)

Trying a new tea from my giant grab-bag variety pack and it is honey aloe green and incredibly delicious and soothing

[eponymous-rose]

severance fans are always like "omg did you catch the last episode that was so crazy!!!" and this is what happened

[eponymous-rose]

I know that realistically you can only fit so many movies into a list of approximately 100, but I cannot take that "How many of tumblr's favorite movies have you seen?" list that's been going around seriously because there are some truly egregious omissions.

Some of it is very clearly recency bias, which makes me wonder if the op truly wasn't on here in 2013 or so, but you're telling me you made a list of "tumblr's favorite movies" that doesn't include Pacific Rim or Mad Max: Fury Road? Because, like, I was there, Gandalf.

[eponymous-rose]

“Cold Harbor is at 100%”. Very happy to share my final poster for season 2 of Severance! Congrats to the entire cast and crew on an incredible finale and season. Can’t wait for season 3!

If anyone is interested in prints, visit jjlendl.com/lumon. Prints for this episode and the rest of my episode-inspired posters will be available for a ONE WEEK ONLY limited timed pre-order window ending next Saturday, March 29th. Thanks!

[eponymous-rose]

this show is so fucking funny

[eponymous-rose]

They give us half a life and think we won't fight for it! SEVERANCE (2022-) 2.10, "Cold Harbor"

[eponymous-rose]

Severance really is that meme with everyone pointing guns at the back of each other's heads, but it's just everyone being Orpheus and Eurydice at each other.