Prettying up the place

As you may have noticed, I’ve got a fancy new banner.  Several of them, in fact, thanks to the work of Alex Gabriel.

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He also made me some business card style square designs.

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I know y’all are just impressed as all get out.  I am pleased, it’s much better than my previous logo.  I am especially pleased because it’s all based on my art — it’s a really lovely marriage of my maths brain and my arts brain.  I think he will give a better break down of the design process but these are the paintings I sent him from which he designed these.

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There’s also a shiny new headshot with my old bio that I may get around to updating.  I’ve also got a fancy new donate button, because it was requested of me by a reader, Deepak Shetty, who was kind enough to actually give before I figured out how to set it up.  I’ve also got an Amazon carousel thing because I signed up for this Amazon thing and they yelled at me that they were shutting me down if no one bought anything from my linking to them, which is fair, as I’ve never linked through them.

In all cases, don’t feel obligated to donate or buy anything, I just put the donate button up because I was asked to, and I am deeply flattered, and the Amazon thing is really an experiment.  You can’t see it if you’ve got AdBlock anyway.  It’s mostly there to show you what ukulele I bought, what gender text book I’m in, and that I eat too many Rowntree’s.  Did my taxes today… my average monthly payment from FtB in 2014 was, you know, $14.13, so, you know.

Anyway, as you may or may not know, I was diagnosed with severe Vitamin D deficiency last week.  I’ve been sick since last July, and it didn’t occur to anyone to test for that because, as the Slymepit noted, I’m extremely pale and it takes very little sunlight for someone of my skin tone to make adequate Vitamin D. On top of that, I live in South Carolina, not the Arctic Circle, so someone like me developing a Vitamin D deficiency is approximately like someone on an orange farm developing scurvy, it just didn’t occur to anyone.  My deficiency is likely due to the fact that I work from home, am also writing a dissertation (theoretically), am allergic to most of the things that grow outside, and avoid sunlight because I burn so easily.  Then it became a bit of a runaway problem because Vitamin D deficiency makes you more susceptible to catching viruses, which meant that despite my pneumococcal and flu vaccines and being well out of age range, I got pneumonia in the summer, then the flu, and then, for Christmas, mono, all of which lasted a very long time and kept me indoors even more than normal.

I have only lately been gaining my energy back from the mono and am now being treated for the deficiency so I have some hope that the massive cloud of fatigue and never ending stream of illnesses I’ve been battling since last summer might finally lift in the next month or two, which is apparently how long it takes for supplements to kick in.

Prettying up the place
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I have mono and everything is difficult

I think you misunderstand. I am not here to keep the darkness out. I am here to keep it in. – Terry Pratchett, Thud!

I haven’t been around so much.  This is because I have mono.

I assumed that if I got to 30 without getting mono it meant that I was one of most everyone who got EBV as a child and it wasn’t terribly noticeable and hooray for me.  I should have been less optimistic.

It’s amazing how much you can not do with your time. Not dissertation, not work, not volunteer, not writing blogs.

There’s a lot of drama going on around here, to which I can only say this: I didn’t know Avicenna very well, I didn’t follow their blog much either.  Much as I hate how some individuals over at Slyme Pit dehumanize some of my friends and colleagues, they did FtB a favor by finding and pointing out the plagiarism.  And if it wasn’t going to be us, it is far, far better that it was them than almost anyone else.

There is something to be said for the fact that even when two groups of people hate each other as much as FtB and SP, it took only a few hours for a legitimate wrong to be corrected once brought up.  I think that speaks to something right in the world.  Now I nap.

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I have mono and everything is difficult