“They’ll try to tell you what it all means”: Links for 2019-03-22

Written by Natalie Luhrs

I'm a lifelong geek with a passion for books and social justice. Fuck around and find out.

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March 22, 2019

I deviated from my plan of working on this post bit by bit through the week and that was not a good life decision because I have other things I want to do and it’s been an hour and a half of sifting links and being distracted by the internet and I cannot sleep in tomorrow because I am a genius who has a therapy appointment every Friday at 8:15 am. And boy oh boy, do I need that appointment this week.

I was reading Emilia Clarke’s essay about her brain aneurysms as one does and, well. Well. The first one she had, the subarachnoid hemorrhage? The one that kills 30% of the people who have one? The one which is technically a stroke?

One thing I didn’t mention in my post from last November that I had seizures in the ER. Caused by a subarachnoid hemorrhage. The medication they had me on to prevent any convulsions was the one I was refusing to take because it made the inside of my mouth feel like raw hamburger. I dealt with weeks of guilt-tripping and near-bullying from medical professionals before they prescribed me another anti-convulsant (which I took happily).

At no point was I told how serious a subarachnoid hemorrhage could be. I have no idea what caused it–I did not have an aneurysm (I just read the cerebral angiogram report) and I didn’t have a traumatic head injury and there’s no congenital deformation to the blood vessels in that area. So who knows?

Based on how information was withheld from me during my first hospital stay, I shouldn’t be surprised by this and yet. Here we are. I just found out by reading a celebrity’s essay about her brain and its problems that I had a fucking stroke eight months ago and that I’m lucky to not be dead or brain-damaged.

I really wish I could still drink.

“More than anything, she believes the invention of the first code represents a complete shift in how our ancestors shared information. For the first time, they no longer had to be in the same place at the same time to communicate with each other, and information could survive its owners.” (This is a bit old, but it’s fascinating.)
This is less an article about how workers in factories and warehouses are mistreated and more of a wide-eyed look at SAP–which is software that I’ve been using for over a decade, is not remotely new, and is famously hard to use. What this article doesn’t mention is that there’s more to SAP than just supply chain management–and I think that’s a real oversight. People have literally died because master data wasn’t put into SAP properly–you manage plant maintenance with it, too, and it generates work orders based on the life cycle of consumable parts and if it doesn’t have the right data, then there’s the possibility of equipment failure with disastrously tragic consequences.
I really love this post about reading and reviewing by Sunita. A lot of good things to think about, especially as we’re in the midst of awards season.

This week’s title comes from Wesley Stace, in honor of his just announced John Wesley Harding tribute tour. Which I totally have tickets to, because eeeee!