chezmax

Sunday night, and I’m still pretty worn out from last week. Lots of meetings - five hours in one day on Thursday, which is… too many meetings. Didn’t get a lot else done through the week, because by mid-week, the meeting schedule just had me all worn out.

We did go to the farmer’s market on Saturday, and it was nice to get out of the house, but having food-related opinions is tough when I’m already overloaded.

Still, beautiful weather, and we got kohlrabi, which was pretty exciting - that’s normally a spring vegetable in Wisconsin, one of the first ones available, and having it in December is a real novelty. (Z and M approve; they’ve never had it before. The German apparently translates to “cabbage-turnip”, or “cabbage which is shaped like a turnip”, which is about right.)

Gave Christmas presents to my parents today - my brother and I exchanged videogames, which is our usual easy option, a few days ago. University branded t-shirts for Mom, books for Dad, so not wildly exciting, but hopefully good. None of us really know what to do for Christmas this year; I think that the existential dread is just making it hard to have real wishes and stars that aren’t just… a desperate wish that the world was better.

The library doesn’t have makerspace open hours this week - almost certainly because the holidays affect staffing and availability - but the knitting and crochet circle on Tuesday is still on, so I’m going to try to check that out, with Z or M depending on who’s willing to come.

Still working on those socks for M, and the mending pile. Finished minor repairs on four t-shirts this weekend, so those are back in circulation. It’s unending, but it’s definitely keeping things “presentable” for a lot longer, and it’s nice to feel confident in fixing or altering things that arrived imperfect.

I’ve been playing the Long War 2 mod for XCOM 2, after finishing the original campaign a bit ago, and that’s been pretty satisfying. The tactical games are a lot more fun for me as puzzle games - savescumming to figure out a strategy that works, exploring different options - than the ironman style which has become so in-vogue in letsplay circles. Long War 2 adds some real complexity - needing to manage multiple squads at once, new kinds of missions, new classes - and I bumped up the difficulty to “commander”, the second-highest. So I’m having a good time, we’ll see if I end up losing the campaign eventually, but… it’s an interesting puzzle game. It reminds me of playing Advance Wars on the GBA, which I was quite fond of as a young kid.

Also working on a Stardew Valley game for the first time in a very long time - I’ve never finished the community center, so I thought that might be fun. Just hit the first Autumn, so that’s slowly coming along.

A lot of stimming to get through the exhaustion, basically.

I finished a couple of books this week -

Folk Magic and Healing (Fez Inkwright) -

A cute overview of the folklore around some everyday plants. It’s definitely not comprehensive and wasn’t intended to be, and it’s very UK-centric, so some of the plants are ones I’m not even familiar with. Still, the discussion of folklore is interesting - honestly, more as a jumping-off point for what real folk beliefs look like, to create new ones of my own in writing. Since a lot of the plants are in the UK, it’s more of an inspiration than a reference guide.

Still, should be useful, and a nice read; pretty illustrations, and a good job of running the gamut of different local and regional folk beliefs. It’s always wild how much varied and dense history the UK has, since in the US, we tend to be much more spread out and much more disconnected from indigenous folk beliefs. (For… very obvious reasons.)

Double Helix (Nancy Werlin) -

I definitely picked this up for a very superficial reason - the author’s name is very similar to that of a teacher I had as a kid, one of the few I was actually fond of, and I was curious whether there was any connection. None that I could find, but it was enough to catch my eye when I bought this as a kid.

(That teacher was pretty cool. She still keeps bees at the apple orchard my family has picked apples at for my whole life, so I occasionally get updates. She also originally came from Utqiagvik (then Barrow), in Alaska, so we got some wild stories from her own childhood as students.)

Anyway… This is a very odd book to read, because it’s near-future speculative fiction from 2004, and quite accurate speculation … which means it’s completely mundane and bizarre to make such a big deal about in 2025.

Briefly, the big spoiler is that our protagonist was conceived through IVF, using pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to ensure that he wouldn’t have Huntington’s disease, since his mother was known to have it. This is treated as a big ethical question, but it’s… wildly normal these days, and I think most people would consider it the responsible thing to do if one or both parents are known carriers for a fatal genetic disease.

It’s weird to remember that that was a big question at one point - and not even very long ago.

The further ethical dilemma is that the rogue scientist who handled the IVF demanded the unused, Huntington’s-positive eggs as his payment. He’s used some of those embryos to create actual children - which is pretty fucked up, because he knows that they will have a fatal and pretty awful disease.

(Honestly, this part is just… hard to take seriously, because under late stage capitalism in particular… y’all, it would not be hard to get some healthy human eggs. He seems to not want the children to have Huntington’s - he just doesn’t have access to healthy gametes. Which seems… wildly silly.)

Our protagonist has also been engineered for intelligence and physical good health, and he’s treated as a bit of an ubermensch, always trying to hide his unique, superhuman abilities. Amusingly, this is the part which feels like silly scifi - engineering for things like intelligence is way harder than it sounds, and might come with some serious knock-on effects. And honestly, it makes no sense that he’s trying to hide it - he’s the child of two fairly exceptional individuals, it’s not surprising for him to be smart and capable.

It feels like the author is grappling with some of the potential eugenicist implications of “designer babies”, but in a really … early way. Like… for better or worse, most American children born with Down syndrome today were born to parents who were aware their child would be disabled, and chose to have them anyway. It’s a very different ethical environment than it was twenty or thirty years ago. And it’s a thorny issue still, but it seems like it revolves more around whether parents feel they can give a good life to those children, rather than whether it’s ethical to know in advance.

The book also includes some transgenic animals who express human recombinant proteins in their milk, which is just… adorable? This is presented as a big scientific deal, and it’s just… normal now.

Interesting and wild time capsule, weird to see how much the discourse around genetic testing and transgenics have changed over the last 20 years. I don’t think I need to hang onto the book, though. Donating.