Big Answers to Small Questions

NMIXX released a video containing both a holiday version of "Blue Valentine" (the same tune and lyrics, but with holiday-style backing music) and a rerecording of "Funky Glitter Christmas." Enjoy!

A couple of fun things to watch for:

1. At about 1:38, Sullyoon comes out of a doll box, which is fun because people often say Sullyoon looks like a doll.
2. At about 1:45, the toys have Lily tied to the floor, a la Gulliver's Travels.

When I order things from Japan and Korea, my goal for managing postage costs is to have the postage cost less than the item, which I'm usually able to manage. Recently one of my friends sent me a package from within the US, for which the postage cost 3x the cost of the item!

This has been a super-stressful week. We had a somewhat lighter than usual round of medical appointments this week, but it was more than made up for by home repair appointments.

We had the garage door installation scheduled for Tuesday, which ended up not being completed that day, so the technician would have to come back Wednesday. Then Tuesday night I discovered that the basement drain was backing up whenever we used the washing machine, dishwasher, or kitchen sink, so I called the plumbing company for that, but they weren't able to send a plumber out until Friday afternoon.

Then Wednesday night, right after the garage door technician left, L. discovered that the washing machine was leaking (totally not related to the basement drain backing up). I tried to fix it, but ended up making it worse. So I had A. call an appliance repair service, who said they could send someone over Thursday morning.

Thursday morning the appliance repair technician came and fixed the dishwasher. Then I had to take A. to get allergy shots, then we went to Ricky's house, where I shoveled the 7-8 inches of snow we'd gotten over the previous two days. (He doesn't drive, but I had to shovel a path from the street to his door so Meals on Wheels could deliver and also to shovel his back stairs to he could let his dogs out.) I'm still sore from this.

Today I had a National Heritage Responders meeting (which went very well), then I had to wait for the plumber to arrive and fix the basement drain. We had originally had a noon to 3PM window for him to show up, which got pushed back to a 2:30PM to 4:30PM window and he ended up showing up at about 3:45PM.

All the house things have been successfully fixed, and we're planning to enjoy this weekend's cold weather from inside the house as much as possible. (It's -2°F out right now, and supposed to go down from here, then only to get as high as 0°F tomorrow, and not to get into actual positive temperatures until Sunday.) But anyway, that's why I've got a massive mental backlog of posts I want to make, and why I've got a folder in my email of comments from you that I want to respond to, and so forth. I hope you're all doing well.

• 6 December
  • Komi Can't Communicate, vol. 30 (Tomohito Oda)
• 9 December
  • I'm in Love with the Villainess (manga), vol. 8 (Inori)
• 10 December
  • Beggars in Spain (Nancy Kress)
• 11 December
  • The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture (Brian Dear)
  • Library Wars: Love & War, vol. 8 (Kiiro Yumi)
• 20 December
  • Laid-Back Camp, vol. 15 (Afro)
  • One Salt Sea (Seanan McGuire)
• 27 December
  • Komi Can't Communicate, vol. 31 (Tomohito Oda)

An addendum to yesterday's QOTD from Jim Henson: When I was growing up, Jim Henson meant a lot to me. Not only because I enjoyed the shows and movies he created, but also also because I knew that he was also from Mississippi, so seeing what he was able to accomplish gave me hope that I would be able to rise above my geographic origins and do something worthwhile. When seemingly everyone who produces everything you enjoy or admire is from someplace else, you cling that much harder to the one example you have who came from the same place you do.

About a month ago, NMIXX came out with their latest sing, "Blue Valentine."

I loved it — I've listened to it so many times! One part of it really confused me, though: From the start of the prechorus (at 0:40) until the beginning of the chorus (at 0:56), the tempo suddenly drops, then has an accelerando until the chorus begins. But I was really confused, though, because the line "You'll always be my blue valentine" in the chorus took the same amount of the time as when the same line was sung at the beginning of the song, but it felt faster. Fortunately, when React to the K (a YouTube channel that feature classical and jazz music students reacting to K-pop songs) did their video reacting to this song, they had an entire section where Liam (a classical percussionist) explains what's happening rhythmically during the prechorus — it took him almost 2 minutes to explain what happened in that 16 seconds of the song, but to me, it was worth it — I'd listened to that part of the song over and over so many times trying to figure out what was happening there, so it was great to finally understand.

This morning I was reading the September 2025 issue of American Historical Review and I happened across two things that struck me as particularly interesting.

The first thing was a typical graphical matter. A page in American Historical Review contains 21.5 cm of text, of which 1 cm is occupied by the divider separating the article text from the footnotes, so 20.5 cm of actual text. A typical page is divided up with somewhere in the nature of 13 cm of text and 7.5 cm of footnotes. However, this being history writing, footnotes are prone to swell up to take more of the page. But I had never, in all my reading of history, encountered a page like page 1044[^1] of this issue, which contained 3 cm of text and 17 cm of footnotes! To make matters even more extreme, when I started looking at the footnotes, I noticed that one of the footnotes continued over onto the next page, so that actual ratio was 3 cm of text to 22 cm of footnotes! This was in the section of a paper that detailed the background historiography of the matter being discussed, so more extensive footnotes are to be expected, but even so, I've never seen anything like this before.

The second thing was a historical matter. It was at the beginning of Giuliana Chamedes' paper "Unpaid Debts: Socialist Internationalism and Jamaica's Bid for a New International Economic Order" (which also contained the extensively footnoted page above). I was so amazed by the first paragraph of this paper that I'm going to type it out in its entirety in order to share it with you:

In 1973, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a resolution calling for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) by an overwhelming majority. The initiative called for the literal and figurative settling of the debt between imperial and formerly colonized countries. Rather than just redistributing wealth within countries, the time had come to address wealth inequality on the world scale. To do so, the NIEO called for the reorganization of international trade, debt relief, the stabilization of commodity prices, and the institution of oversight for multinational corporations. It insisted on the protection of economic sovereignty for decolonized and decolonizing countries to "correct inequalities and redress existing injustices," suggesting that decolonization was an ongoing struggle. Many countries participated in the NIEO's drafting, including Jamaica, one of the founding members of the Group of 77 (G77). A "high point in the expression of a new internationalism, namely, that of countries emerging from colonialism," the NIEO represented a landmark in global history, as Sabrine Kott and others have argued. But by the early 1980s, the project was dead in the water.

My mind was blown upon reading this paragraph. Despite having a master's degree in history and having done a lot of reading outside of school in matters of history and politics, all of this information was new to me. I'd never even heard of the Group of 77. I read this paragraph a couple of days ago, I've done a lot of thinking about it since then, and I'm still trying to puzzle out how different the world would be if the NIEO had proceeded as planned.[^2]

[^1] American Historical Review uses continuous numbering across a volume, so this issue actually started on page 1009.

[^2] The phrase "the early 1980s" should give you a clue: The Reagan and Thatcher governments played a large role in stopping the NIEO.

For as long as I can remember, I've disliked sleep. It seems like the biggest waste of time there could possibly be. I've used sleep as an argument against intelligent design — not necessarily against "design," but at the very least against "intelligent": Designing a mechanism that has to be shut down for at least 1/3 of its lifespan in order to function doesn't strike me as a very good idea. Combine this with my perfectionist/workaholic tendencies and you end up with someone who goes full tilt until they just can't anymore, at which point I end up going to bed several hours early, regardless of what I'm leaving undone, because I just physically cannot stay awake any longer.

I know it's not the healthiest way to do things, but I just can't seem to help myself, and until they come up with a chemical substitute for sleep that has fewer side effects than meth or cocaine, well. . . there I am. Or, well, there I was. As we were driving home from the dentist yesterday, A. came up with a way to weaponize my perfectionism against me: Make rest a quantifiable plan/goal for me to work toward (quantifiable both so that I can be sure that I'm doing it and also so that I can know when I've done it enough and don't have to do it anymore). She managed to get me to commit to two 10-minute meditations a week along with one night a week where I don't write (as writing is the last thing I do every day, so it often delays my bedtime). She tried to get me to commit to two meditations and two nights of not writing, I tried to talk her down to two meditations and one night where I try not to write, and this is what we settled on. I'm willing to concede that it's possible that taking this additional rest will make me so much more productive in the time that I'm not resting that I won't resent the time spent resting. On the other hand, if 52 years of sleeping almost every night hasn't reconciled me to the necessity of sleeping. . .

You can see them here. They look really great, and you can pre-order them by 9AM PST on 12 November 2025, for delivery in October 2026. Unfortunately, you can only order them as a set of three for $150, which seems a bit excessive to me. I'm sure they'll set a bunch of them, but not to me.

I even double-checked to be sure this wasn't just another example of "prices going up while I wasn't looking," and it wasn't — $50 per doll is 4-5 times the price of a regular Barbie doll, which just strikes me as excessive. I could see twice the price of a regular Barbie, and at that price I'd think about it. But that at this price. At this price I look at the page and immediately nope right out.

Last night I dreamed that I was hanging out with Blackpink Jennie — I'm not sure if we were dating or just friends, but we knew each other very well and either option could have been a possibility. Anyway, we were at a convention that was like a combination craft fair/science fair for geology and/or conspiracy theories.[^1] While we were there, we ran into our dentist[^2] and our dentist's new business partner. Jennie and I both agreed that the new business partner was kind of strange — he was obsessed with the idea of some sort of link between diagonally opposing teeth[^4] — but we couldn't say anything about it because we didn't want to offend our dentist. Jennie and I were still trying to come up with a socially acceptable way to ditch our dentist and his partner when I woke up.

[^1] To give a better idea of what it was like, it was kind of like a dealers' room at a con: A huge room filled with tables, each table with a person behind it. Some of the people wanted to sell you something, some just wanted to tell you about their findings/theories. Some seemed to be related to geology, some to conspiracy theories, and some to both.

[^2] Not my IRL dentist, and probably not Jennie's IRL dentist either.[^3]

[^3] I don't know who Jennie's dentist is, but I'd be very, very surprised if her dentist isn't Korean, and this dentist was an elderly white man.

[^4] For example, that a problem with the left upper first molar would also cause problems in the right lower first molar.