Anyone else aggressively unsubscribing from newsletters during quarantine?

Is an employee’s salary set by labor market competition for workers with a skill set or by the marginal product of their labor?

We got our Baltimore City primary ballots. I think I’ve decide who I’m going to vote for in the mayor’s race. I am otherwise undecided and under informed.

I’m not sure I understand what web developers mean when they say static web app. It seems to mean something that very much is not a static site.

I never would have guessed that Windows would get a first party package manager ahead of macOS. Apple’s lack of investment in macOS is brutal.

📚Read: The Rosewater Redemption by Tade Thomspon

Every time I get angry about an app redesign I remind myself that Instagram still lacks an iPad app.

Never read the subreddit dedicated to a medical condition you’ve been diagnosed with.

“Next? I was going to order a chicken parm and watch Bladerunner.”

I don’t often think I’m like Ben Wyatt, but there are some ways I’m extremely Ben Wyatt.

That thing where you can sing the two opening versus of a song perfectly and it sounds amazing, but it can’t possibly work because the chorus and bridge are out of your range and every rearrangement you try kills the propulsive force of the song.

I missed it by a couple of days.

After years of conflicting advise and being bounced from specialist to specialist for keratoconus, I finally seemed to have found a set of doctors I trusted and who gave me a solid course of action.

The news was not great– the scarring on my left eye was fairly severe, dead center. My right now, now also presenting with keratoconus could not receive corneal cross-linking, a promising laser-based treatment to temper the progression of keratoconus, because my left eye vision was so poor the risks outweighed the benefits.

The hope? Improve the left eye, hopefully before summer, so that I could get corneal cross-linking before the right eye got as bad as the left. How would we do this? After years of not having corrected/correctable vision in that eye and all blur, it was time to take seriously my need for a partial corneal transplant. My hope had always been to avoid this, because I’m young, there are risks, they don’t last forever, and artificial corneas seem just years away.

This latest doctor though gave me some hope– they would be willing to do the partial transplant, but first they insisted I try scleral lenses. I had been offered lenses in the past, but with caveats. I was told they were expensive, that my keratoconus was so severe they’d need to order whole new fitting kits, and that the likelihood was I’d get only modest vision improvement. My new doctor said that she thought we’d have much better luck focusing through (around?) the scarring. That if she could get me to 20/40 vision with the lenses, we would have some options to do a “scrape” to try and remove the scar tissue instead of a full transplant.

This whole course of action was a bit time bound– we wanted to see if we can’t get to the crosslinking before the right eye got worse and risked scarring.

And of course, my follow up was the first week of quarantine.

Today, I got to go to that follow up appointment. And to my delight and surprise (and even to my doctor’s surprise), we did better than 20/40 with the scleral lens. For the first time in 5 years, not only could I make out shapes with my left eye, I achieved a “blurry 20/20”.

I’m frustrated. I have had doctor’s telling me about scleral lenses for years, but making clear that I should only expect modest improved vision and that it was a pain in the butt and expensive. They are expensive. And I don’t know yet how much of a pain in the ass they’ll be. But at least for now, I won’t need a transplant and starting in a few weeks, I’ll be using both of my eyes to see again.

📚 Read: Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett

Has anyone else seen their iMessages just explode in size? This is crazy.

What a pleasure to be able to take a 3 mile stroll in Wyman Park .

[She] has her own story; she is not a supporting character of yours.

— Rosewater, by Tade Thompson 💬

What if now is the time I start becoming a heavy DEVONthink user?

A love that hides is already halfway to becoming regret.

– Charlie Jane Anders, The City in the Middle of the Night 💬

Really enjoying @exercism_io. If you already know how to program in one language, it’s a great way to learn a new one alongside a solid book. Especially if you like puzzles. And the mentor commenting has been helpful at getting me idiomatic and helping me learn standard library.

As my mother once said: The boys throw stones at the frogs in jest. But the frogs die in earnest

— The Female Man, by Joanna Russ 💬

There are no words.

I don’t believe in making homemade ketchup, because Heinz is perfect.

– Claire Saffitz 💬

Val Kilmer comes through as equal parts riveting and tragic, just like in his best roles in The Iceman Come Backeth¹.

Truly, our government is being run by the worst people, who are in business with the worst people, and displaying a level of ineptitude that crosses into criminality.

The story of the non-existent N95 masks purchased by the VA.

Democracy is of limited usefulness when there are no good choices, or when the good choices become bad as soon as you’ve chosen them, or when all the [i]nformation access in the world can’t make people use it.

– Malka Older, Infomocracy 💬

📚 Read: The Mortal Word by Genevieve Cogman