11 posts since I created Quitter in January 2023.
64 words, a 1 minute read.
These are not the same:
Pain medication may have helped with chronic pain even when pain scores remain the same.
669 words, a 4 minute read.
A couple weeks ago, my partner and I took a train to spend some days around his hometown. One afternoon, we accidentally went around the entire skirt of a mountain, relentlessly harassed by insects (I had never seen so many). Without having planned it, we made one last effort to walk even further to see a big lake where swimming and fishing were permitted. I couldn't swim in it because I hadn't brought my swimwear.
I swim in pools regularly, a couple times a week for the past 5 years or so. I had been thinking about swimming in open waters besides the beach for some time. I unfortunately live in a city without much greenery, so I'd love to swim while sight seeing — but I don't have enough money to travel (even short distances) or buy a neoprene wetsuit at the moment.
At first, I was sad while I stared at the lake, unable to go into it. However, that night it crossed my mind for the first time that, if I was now serious about open water swimming, I would need to physically prepare myself for it first. And having something to work towards while I save money made me feel excited.
I've been back home for some days now. Today I broke a long streak of not being able to swim because of the trip and a bad cold that I've been recovering from. I was off to the gym with an objective in mind: see for how long I could swim laps without stopping nor touching the pool's floor.
I don't normally do resistance swimming. I swim for 20 to 40 minutes at a time and mostly do sprints for cardio, resting between some laps. I expected to last for around 30 minutes when not swimming for speed; but, to my surprise, I managed to swim for 1 hour and 15 minutes straight. I even felt like I could keep going, but I stopped because I was hungry for lunch already (and wrinkly as a raisin).
Being able to swim for one hour in a pool would probably amount to around 30 minutes in open water (currents and cold are very tiring) so I still have a lot of training to do and long hours to swim. Thankfully, lengthy swimming is a little less dull while listening to music or podcasts with my waterproof mp3 player, one of the best buying decisions I've made.
Today's swimming has also been stimulating for another reason. A few days ago, I had the shower thought that front crawl, backstroke, breaststroke and butterfly couldn't possibly be all existing swimming strokes. An awkward Internet search for "weird swimming strokes" revealed to me the sidestroke. It's a very energy-efficient stroke because of the long gliding it generates, and so it is used by lifeguards, the military and long-distance swimmers.
With one side upwards, the kick is done by separating the legs by the knees, one to the front and the other to the back, and then bringing them together swiftly. At the same time, the arm from the upper side pushes water towards the feet, and the other arm stretches forward for the glide before bringing the arms together for the next stroke. Here's how it looks:
(Image credit: Claraakc, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons).
I was eager to try it today, and I was surprised to find that I could already get the hang of it with both sides, with some repetition. I ended up using exclusively sidestroke in the last 20 minutes of the swim, because it was indeed less tiring and just as fast as breaststroke or backstroke.
I'll be testing my resistance further soon. I'm happy that, between my new long-distance objective and a new stroke, I could still bring some novelty into a hobby that goes all the way back to my childhood.
727 words, a 4 minute read.
No soy un usuario técnico, pero Linux me ha llamado la atención desde hace años. Vale, supongo que sí que soy un usuario más técnico que mis padres. También me interesa aprender sobre ordenadores, pero los motivos principales por los que me atrae Linux son sociales.
Instalé Linux Mint (una de las muchas distribuciones, "distros", de Linux) en mi portátil, junto a Windows 10. He configurado un dual boot, es decir, tengo una partición de Windows y otra de Linux y cada vez que mi ordenador se inicia aparece un menú en el que puedo elegir rápidamente si quiero arrancar con un sistema operativo o el otro.
Por lo visto, Linux Mint es una distro muy recomendada para personas novatas, tanto por su parecido con Windows como por su proceso de instalación y comunidad.
Para mí la instalación fue relativamente sencilla, pero creo que usuarios novatos no técnicos encontrarían dificultades. Es un proceso con bastantes pasos, por lo que es más fácil atascarse en alguno de ellos. Además, la configuración de BIOS (arranque) de cada modelo de ordenador es distinta, y muchas personas se sentirían intimidadas si tuvieran que orientarse sin ayuda de tutoriales en esos menús, pensados para usuarias avanzadas.
De momento y pese a las dificultades, estoy satisfecho con Linux Mint y la personalización superior que permite. Dudo que vuelva a instalar Windows en un futuro, aunque con este ordenador lo sigo usando de tanto en cuando por comodidad.
Si nos cononcemos personalmente y te interesa probarlo pero tienes problemas para hacerlo, me encantará ayudarte.
277 words, a 2 minute read.
I mainly read non-fiction, but I like to read fiction as well if any aspect of the story, characters, writing style or fictional universe is new, weird or relatable enough to me to pique my interest.
So I've read a couple of Haruki Murakami novels: Kafka on the Shore and Sputnik Sweetheart. They were recommended to me years ago, Kafka on the Shore in particular because...
... it features a gay trans man.
I liked some aspects of the books, I'm not even sure if I liked them as a whole. But they've certainly left some impression in me, which is something I value. Both felt quite slow and uninteresting to me at the start, but somewhere along the middle of the book the story picked up, and interesting, suspenseful and crazy things were constantly happening—which made it difficult to put the book down at times.
I'm still not sure if I didn't totally get the stories or if there's not that much I should get. But I appreciate their dreamy quality, imagery and characters.
Here's a list of my favorite things from each story:
Kafka on the Shore:
Sputnik Sweetheart:
608 words, a 4 minute read.
It's been a while since I last posted something. I've been very busy without getting much benefit from it, so I'm feeling somewhat stuck in life at the moment. But here's a string of thoughts I've had.
Some days ago, I was comfortably lying down on a bench in a park, getting a break from the heat under a tree's shadow. I was reading this book: Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. Here's an excerpt from its preface:
[The gender data biases] impact on women’s lives every day. The impact can be relatively minor. Shivering in offices set to a male temperature norm, for example, or struggling to reach a top shelf set at a male height norm. Irritating, certainly. Unjust, undoubtedly.
But not life-threatening. Not like crashing in a car whose safety measures don’t account for women’s measurements. Not like having your heart attack go undiagnosed because your symptoms are deemed ‘atypical’. For these women, the consequences of living in a world built around male data can be deadly.
I was just starting chapter 1, which talks about urban planning, and particularly about public transport.
It explains that women, because they assume most of the care work (that is, unpaid work such as taking care of family and housework), are more likely to trip-chain. Trip-chaining is a travel pattern characterized by multiple short travels, such as those one does when running multiple errands: taking the kids to school, accompanying an elder to the hospital, getting groceries on the way home, walking the dog, leaving again to get the kids. That is in contrast to the linear travel patterns typical of men, like home-work-home.
And when it comes to public transport route layouts, typical radial systems favor the home-work-home (or home-leisure-home) travel pattern, to the detriment of trip-chaining (that is, mostly women). Trip-chaining benefits from grid-like structures. In my city, somewhat recently, bus travel routes were changed to be grid-like, presumably for this very reason.
As I was leaving the park, I remembered a fun game I had been playing, Mini Metro. It is minimalistic in both graphic style and game mechanics, which is delightful.
In Mini Metro, the objective is to link the rapidly appearing shapes (stations) with metro train lines. The simulated passengers want to travel to a particular kind of shape, and the player must design an efficient line system.
The game simulates passenger and station behavior in such a way that:
To me, those were strong incentives to devise radial line systems, instead of grid-like ones.
This left me pondering: what kinds of passenger behavior would need to be implemented/discarded so that the efficiency of a grid-like system as a gameplay strategy (and thus women travel patterns) would become apparent? Would allowing for travel between same-shaped stations be sufficient?
As I don't really have an answer right now... I'll just wrap it up by recommending again both Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men and Mini Metro.
