Reconstitution. A vial's labeled strength is not a dose. Add the diluent, divide the total mass by the volume of water, and you have mg per mL. From there a dose in mL, and in insulin units, follows. Writing that ratio down at the moment you mix prevents most errors.

Titration as a history. Most protocols step up on a schedule. The useful record is the step history – what dose, for how long, and what happened – not just today's number.

Site rotation. Rotating injection sites is easy to lose track of after several weeks.

Expiry after puncture. Worth recording next to the reconstitution ratio, since both start on the same day.

Nothing here is medical advice; dosing decisions belong with your prescriber.

And then you get to the STEM section and it's all “AI” projects.

The thing is, I can see how that would sound super cool and attractive to both parents and kids—the promise of getting to walk out of a program with a bunch of finished things like 3d models, song compositions, video games would in fact sound cool as hell to me if I was that age? But as a parent who is also a programmer it is driving me up a hecking wall. There is a “vibecoding” class. I hate it here.

I learned programming out of books when I was like, 8, which definitely had less exciting results. But it did teach me foundational concepts like iteration and conditionals and variables that I could apply to other languages as I grew up, and maybe even more importantly, I got to tinker with stuff and just... fuck around without having there necessarily be a Product. I made a bunch of stupid websites talking about how much I liked basketball and Cardcaptors and Sailor Moon and just tried stuff to see if it worked.

It just kind of sucks that kids are already being shilled this stuff from age 6+. I hope the yam is excited for vintage typing software and learning programming in a cave with a box of scraps.

(Crossposted from my personal site.)

I’m on, like, a million blogging platforms. Come on.

I host a clone of Dreamwidth and am on Dreamwidth. I have a Pillowfort account. I have a Tumblr blog, and a blog on my personal site, and an account on my friend Brennan’s WriteFreely instance. I have a half-filled journal I don’t write in anymore, because thinking about my life for too long means I remember how stagnant it feels. I have so many places to put my thoughts, and I don’t use them. I wrote my first blog post since March on my birthday, which is at the end of June. I rarely write personal essays anymore and I can’t remember the last time I wrote a poem. I never feel like I have anything interesting to say.

I’m basically housebound at the moment, I have no friends outside of the internet, I do very few things besides medical treatments and picking up groceries or fast food. My life is frozen in stasis, trapped in a huge chunk of ice that is going to melt down into a pool of water one of these days, and my body will fall down limp and wet and dead because nothing can survive for that long without growth. So I end up writing about that — the pain and agony and isolation I face on a daily basis — or I end up writing nothing. Sometimes I think these two options are the same villain and soon the mask wil fall off and my brain will go, “Ah, damn, I would’ve successfully repressed that if it weren’t for you meddling kids!” before it is caught red-handed and brought down for its crimes. And wouldn’t that be nice, to put it down, just for a moment…

It isn’t just blogging, either. It’s every form of communication present in my life. I want to talk to the people I love, to be open and talkative and engaging and interesting, but because my life is so repetitive and beige I don’t find I have much to discuss, and the things I do have to discuss aren’t really things you can chat about casually. Like, who wants to be met with, “Oh, I’m fine, but I had to take three times my perscribed dose of Ativan earlier to get me to stop crying because I’m so terrified of mortality, and now I feel like a dead fish and not even an edible one” when they come to me and excitedly ask, “Hey, how are you?”

Other times I find myself thinking my existence – my needs and my wants, my excitements and difficulties and dreams and fears – my all – is simply Too Much, and must be folded and folded and folded and folded up until the banquet of me becomes the smallest, scarcest crumb. That I must hold myself back, for the sanity and comfort of others. That in order to live any sort of life, I have to hit the Randomize Sim button and become some different sort of wild mess. I don’t think I want to swap out my trait chips, though; I think I want to stop seeing myself as a video game character in general and live in the real world, where there aren’t cheat codes that bring you back from the dead and make you rich, where the Grim Reaper himself doesn’t ever show up with any sort of mercy, doesn’t show his face at all, but it’s scary.

I think if a final girl lived one day in my brain she’d be on the first train back to Angel Falls, begging for the slasher to just fix it all already. Sometimes I think I’m the final girl of this family – the only one to really make it out – but I don’t think that’s a very apt comparison when I have no hands to grasp the door handle with, no hands to pull myself up and over and out and away with, no hands to fight back with. They shake too much, they’re bound together with bundles of my mother’s veins behind my back and I cannot bear to break my restraints, so I stay here. I have to make it back to my family, I have to stop ruining the little time they have left with silly stupid grievances such as “complex post traumatic stress disorder”. I just have to get better.

I have to start blogging.

I don’t know how. I used to do it every day when I was a child, but that stopped when I developed the superpower of insecurity about my work and my thoughts and my place in this world. I don’t feel like I have much to say beyond wanting to have something to say. I don’t feel like there is anything I can say that hasn’t already been said in a more articulate and poetic fashion by someone else more desirable and interesting and experienced than I am. I find that there is very little room in my life for self-defined accomplishment or pride or love; my sense of accomplishment, my concept of self-worth in general, seems tied entirely to how useful I am to others—how much I am wanted around, desired, talked to, seen, acknowledged. And when the entire world’s opinion of you holds the same weight — when you take the opinion of some random stranger on an anonymous gossip forum and treat it with the same seriousness you’d treat, like, your mother’s opinion of you — sharing becomes impossible, because pleasing everyone isn’t possible. It still feels like if I move too fast around the beast, it will strike. And there is always a beast.

I think I have to get used to meaninglessness? I have to develop a sense of self that is actually centered around the self. It isn’t as bad as it used to be — I actually recognize the problem now, and I’m working on fixing the problem, but good lord I’ve been in this operating room too damn long. I have to find a way to be okay with the stagnation and the lack of a response and the emptiness—not because I think it is all I will ever get or all I deserve, but because I have to find a way to exist in the flux. Life is chaotic. Not everyone is going to adore me. Sometimes I will go a day without talking to any other person, and that doesn’t mean I am going to die alone; sometimes everyone is just busy at the same time, and that can’t undo me. I have to find a way to become comfortable with balance when I am only used to intensity and oversaturation.

I have to find a way out. I was worried for so long that I have no tangible future, but ironically I think if I keep ruminating on that, I will ensure its fruition. So I have to find a way out. I have to start in the middle. I have to dive.

I have to start blogging.