Slightly to my surprise, earlier today I got a text from my GP saying approximately "yes your serum ferritin is now 'normal', but also, uh, by this we mean '15, with a reference range of 13-150, after six weeks of supplements', so... keep taking the supplements and we'll retest in six weeks!!!"
It is possible that the reason this actually got flagged at all was in fact that I've got a slightly elevated white cell count, and had I just had normal serum ferritin I'd have had to submit the "uhhh sooooo..." eConsult. Which I'd been gearing up to do, because the serum ferritin result showed up in the NHS app sooner than anything else!
Unfortunately, I had been working myself up to mentioning some Possible Additional Signs Of Concern in said eConsult (the various unimportant bleeding, like "there is usually old blood when I blow my nose BUT/AND I am very much using a steroid nasal spray every day") and I now have a solid excuse to keep putting it off for another six weeks, but hey. No longer officially anaemic! Pity about what's going to happen when I run out of supplementary iron, huh!
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News:
The Danish Defence Intelligence Service (DDIS) announced on Thursday that Moscow was behind a cyber-attack on a Danish water utility in 2024 and a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on Danish websites in the lead-up to the municipal and regional council elections in November.
The first, it said, was carried out by the pro-Russian group known as Z-Pentest and the second by NoName057(16), which has links to the Russian state.
Slashdot thread.
( 22: Magister )
After twenty-six years, Microsoft is finally upgrading the last remaining instance of the encryption algorithm RC4 in Windows.
of the most visible holdouts in supporting RC4 has been Microsoft. Eventually, Microsoft upgraded Active Directory to support the much more secure AES encryption standard. But by default, Windows servers have continued to respond to RC4-based authentication requests and return an RC4-based response. The RC4 fallback has been a favorite weakness hackers have exploited to compromise enterprise networks. Use of RC4 played a key role in last year’s breach of health giant Ascension. The breach caused life-threatening disruptions at 140 hospitals and put the medical records of 5.6 million patients into the hands of the attackers. US Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) in September called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Microsoft for “gross cybersecurity negligence,” citing the continued default support for RC4.
Last week, Microsoft said it was finally deprecating RC4 and cited its susceptibility to Kerberoasting, the form of attack, known since 2014, that was the root cause of the initial intrusion into Ascension’s network.
Fun fact: RC4 was a trade secret until I published the algorithm in the second edition of Applied Cryptography in 1995.
Do image links also get redirected automatically ? Or do you need to update your old posts referencing those images, since the username is in the URL too??
( 21: Troll )
Pinch hits are claimed on a first-come-first-serve basis. You do not have to be signed up for the exchange to claim a pinch hit.
To claim: comment on this post (comments are screened) OR send us an email at tlt.fic.exchange@gmail.com. In both cases, please include your AO3 username AND include the username and/or Pinch Hit number (i.e. PH 69) of the request you're claiming.
This pinch hit is due with the rest of the assignments on December 27, 2025 at 11:59pm PST.
PH4 - rhythmofsnow
Request 1
Rating: Teen and Up Audiences
Medium: Fic, Art
Relationships: Solo: Mercymorn the First
Additional Tags: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Pre-Canon
Request 2
Rating: Teen and Up Audiences
Medium: Fic, Art
Relationships: Group: Pyrrha Dve & Camilla Hect & Nona & Palamedes Sextus, Group: Pyrrha Dve/Palamedes Sextus/Dulcinea Septimus
Additional Tags: Domestic Fluff,Fluff, Found Family
Request 3
Rating: Teen and Up Audiences
Medium: Fic
Relationships: Group: Mercymorn the First/Augustine the First
Additional Tags: a psychosexual mess of roleplaying and bad meals, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gideon Nav as Kiriona Gaia
Link to full request
Reading. Nothing (quite) finished; various snippets. ( Scalzi, Bourke, Boddice, Cowart )
Watching. Wake Up Dead Man (the third instalment in the Benoit Blanc/Knives Out mysteries). ( Read more... )
Three episodes of Man vs. Bee, in company; this is... not for me.
Playing. Inkulinati! And, with the niblings: Match Madness, The Genius Square, Rummikub, Dixit.
Cooking. A new-to-me fruitcake recipe from one of my cookbooks; a dal from the cookbook I am not actually going to manage Making Everything From by the end of the calendar year (but I am pretty close).
Eating. I have now had A Mince Pie. Also a very long lunch at the Gardeners Arms. The brownies that all the reviews of the place we wound up staying in Ardlingy mentioned (which were indeed v good).
Exploring. Wakehurst Place, both at night for Glow Wild and during daylight (a little)!
Growing. Bought curry leaves. Proceeded to strip most of the stems (freezing the leaves) and Treat As Cuttings. There's at least one of them that doesn't look actually dead yet...
Observing. OWL OWL OWL. Very talkative tawny, as we were leaving Wakehurst on Friday night. Snowdrops, also at Wakehurst, to my mild horror. And, blessedly, NOT The Charity Tractor Parade...
( 20: Performer )
As it was December 13, Santa Lucia Day, I also brought lussekatter, for us to have with our coffee as we baked. We spread the cookies out on a long table in my sister's living room. By taking up columns of cookies, we each had a nice mix.
M came along with Alona and Fiona, to the joy of all. Her first cookie baking!
Description: Background: a table covered with rows of Christmas cookies: bottom: a group of women smile at the camera. Top: three lussekatter
Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.
Yesterday I did lots of walking and visited a 500-year-old convent, with a lot of impressive tiles and beautiful ceilings.
Today I took two cable cars to visit two different gardens on two different mountains. And also did a lot of walking, much of which was Up.
The gardens were a touch disappointing, and at this time of year mostly felt like tourist traps. Things might be different in summer, and it is certainly unfair to judge a garden by how it looks in December. But I didn't mind, because I was enjoying being out and about at altitude, with views and nice air. I also love travelling by cable car. It's not necessary nowadays - all of the places I went have road access - but it's smooth and calm and quiet, and by looking down you get a fascinating insight into bits of the town you'd never normally see.
One thing that struck me is that Madeira's roads are a marvel of engineering and, I suspect, EU money, thanks to the challenging topography... but beyond this, the infrastructure is incredibly three-dimensional. Dual carriageways will zip across the city, passing over valley roads to enter tunnels only a few metres under somebody's house. I'm almost sure there are roads in tunnels that pass over each other. One of the cable cars I took today passed under a power line. I admire the intricacy and the 3D thinking, and I am in awe at its construction.
I'm here to wind down and not feel pressured to do anything. That's nice, but of course it's going to need a lot more than a few days of that to make more than a short term difference.
An Oklahoma University students decided to stage a stunt and submit an assignment that was a personal attack on the person that was grading it. Unsurprisingly, she failed the assignment. Also unsurprisingly, others have decided to use this as a way to attack the grader and all other trans people, and the grader has been the only one punished for this, because the crime of being trans and in a position where you might pass or fail someone is much greater than deliberately provoking an outrage machine to work on your behalf. Because, of course, the student claims being failed was because she spoke her religious truth, and not because she intended to provoke an outrage machine.
The national Girl Guides organization in the United Kingdom was forced into banning all trans girls from participating in Girlguiding under the threat of being sued into the ground for continuing to admit trans girls. Similarly, the Women's Institute was forced to exclude trans women from their organization because of similar threats. The Labour party says they have to ban trans women from the main events of their Women's conference. The animating problem in all of these decisions is the morally bankrupt UK Supreme Court decision that defined women according to their assigned sex at birth and visible sexual characteristics rather than by some standard that would actually include all people who are women.
Steve Cropper, legendary musician and involved in an awful lot of music that people would know by listening to a few bars, is back with bandmates at the age of 84 years. The only reason I know that name is because Steve Cropper was one of the band members playing behind the Blues Brothers, in both movies, and presumably in many of the other skits involved with the Blues Brothers. Damn good musician.
( Plenty inside, from people behaving badly to zooborns )
Last out for tonight, drag the Pantone company for the entirety of this upcoming year, as they chose an anodyne shade of white for 2026. While that may be accurate, in that's what the U.S. administration wants to have happen in the year, removing all traces of any color other than white, surely the people picking colors could have done a better job than thinking that whiteness was the way to go in this day and age.
What might happen when the suffering child of Omelas is murdered, and how much Omelas will do its best to put things back the way they used to be, because they all believe the lifelong suffering of one child is better than the possible suffering of many children.
The punk spirit never dies, but Everyone Asked About You had a revival due to an old album having been uploaded, and then discovered, and rediscovered, and then became entirely more popular than they would have ever imagined.
And a story about how a writer was almost ground into paste because people preferred the LLM version of the writing to the authentic thing, and how a friend managed to claw back a space where the pablum was not considered the pinnacle.
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