Intermission
This article was originally shared on Substack.
It’s been a bit quiet on this front from the outside, but no less busy. And honestly, it’s been a bit rough.
Iron is important, y’all.
I had a minor medical procedure about a month ago with an estimated two weeks of needing time off for recovery and pain management (those hospital-issued pain meds do not mess around). I’m also currently in a period of treating low iron and at the stage where there’s a very high likelihood of iron infusions in my future. However, the medical procedure combined with another iron-related health thing has meant that I’m delaying the next blood test until I’m both healed and those other things stabilise so we know if the iron supplements I’m on are actually doing anything useful.
Low iron is not an uncommon problem to have, and it’s more common in women than men due to the whole bleeding for about a week every month thing, but I do know a guy who has had regular iron infusions since he was a teenager, so it does happen. You can google all the other fun things that result from having low iron, but one of the big ones is energy levels.
My iron’s been low for a very long time, and I had assumed my tiredness was due to being a parent. I’ve felt knackered since I had my daughter and just learned to function with a battery that never gets fully charged. And you know what? I thought I had it alright because I met a woman whose iron was so dangerously low due to an undiagnosed internal bleed (this sounds terrifying to me as well, I get it) that she simply lost her will to do anything. It took a few years for this to be resolved. The fact that some of the symptoms she experienced sound like they’d make you score higher in a mental health assessment would contribute to a long road to diagnosis and treatment for some as well.
In the meantime, I’ve been trying to increase my iron intake through my diet on top of the iron supplements, but I still suspect that I’m losing more iron than I’m taking in. Combined with the recent medical things and physical recovery (pain really takes it out of you), I’ve been feeling quite wiped out. It’s been a blessing in disguise that I’ve also had a couple of STEAM Powered guests have to reschedule so I had this time to get back on track. But that does mean no new episodes for a little while. :(
Thesaurus Inventus
That said, I’m a masochist who is high functioning on low energy and alertness levels, and my muse kicked in right before I was due to go into hospital. This meant that as soon as I got home I released an episode of STEAM Powered, then for much of the two weeks while I was high on pain meds, I was abusing The Ballmer Peak and writing a web app.
Last week, I launched Thesaurus Inventus, which is essentially Pinterest for writers. I apologise that it only came into being halfway through NaNoWriMo, but that’s muses and post-operative recovery for you.
The motivation
I’m not a writer.
Alright, that’s not accurate because gestures vaguely at substack, but I’m a tinkerer, and while I don’t believe I have a novel in me (at the moment), I am a creative nerd and I like to nerd about creative people being creative and their process.
So I love reading about writers and their research, and about the tips and advice they like to share about their workflow and creative processes. It’s fascinating because often it’s about coming at things from a different angle, and getting your mind to think in ways you wouldn’t normally use, and the attention to detail (for some) is so intricate that you have to wonder if it was lived experience or dedicated research.
It also seems a damned shame that some of these invaluable nuggets of treasure get lost in the constant flow of social media streams.
Sure, writers will have their own scrapbooks and bookmarks for this kind of thing, but I’m nosy and want to know what they’ve got. Also, if you’re a writer who is into Victorian-era black market crime-romances, I’m sure you’d like to know what other Victorian-era black market crime-romance writers find interesting as well.
And thus, Thesaurus Inventus.
Why Thesaurus Inventus?
Thesaurus inventus is actually a Latin term from Roman property law (thesauri inventio) relating to found treasure and ownership. We’re not claiming ownership here, knowledge is to be shared, but ‘treasure trove’ was taken and thesaurus inventus sounds nice.
More features are coming, but I’d love for you to take it for a spin. Feedback is also welcome.
STEAM Powered
This week’s STEAM Powered is with Cairo Malet, Cyber Security GRC Specialist. In our conversation, we talk about Cairo's indirect journey to cyber security, and what cyber security entails from policy to supply chain cyber security and social engineering.
Quite Interesting
It would be remiss of me to not plug my own work, so I’m going to share Thesaurus Inventus as a resource for writers. Personally, I’m glad to have a place to share these links in a place that’s easy to find. Even with tags on Tumblr it’s a pain to look for resources I have previously shared. I hope others find it useful as well.
In my conversation with Cairo, she mentioned Hack The Box, a community and learning space for those interested in cyber security and hacking. Great for old hands and new, and you can learn about Capture the Flag (CTF) events and challenges that are taking place.
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (GoodReads) is a book I’ve had for a while but had been too intimidated to read. It’s the size of a university textbook. But I started it again during pre-op (for reference, not a good choice for hospital reading due to its physical weight) and I’m really enjoying it. With the format switching between first-person POV to what resembles a scrapbook with excerpts and clippings, this book is a journey. Friends had recommended this to me, but I was concerned about the genre (complicated relationship with horror). This review on GoodReads, however, convinced me to pick it up. If you get a copy (there are several editions), I highly recommend one in full colour with the annotations and odd formatting. It’s part of the experience.
There are two Backend as a Service (BaaS) platforms I’m exploring at the moment. The first is Supabase which is a Firebase alternative that has a PostgreSQL backend. They’re also flat-rate billed which I find to be a refreshing change to the services that bill per-read/write/breath. It’s still in beta and there are a few features that are lacking but feels pretty solid so far. The community is reasonably active, and the developer response on the repo isn’t bad either. It’s what Thesaurus Inventus is built on and quite painless to get going (not just due to the pain meds either). The worst part of this so far is the fact that I can’t get Google to approve Supabase as my third-party authentication provider, despite the fact they have approved other Supabase users for the same, and they keep sending back canned responses. It’s a bit like talking to a brick wall. But I will persevere.
The other service is Deta. No auth, but does the rest of it and is perfect for microservices. Wouldn’t quite support what I want to do with the main Thesaurus Inventus app, but perfect for dinky little auxiliary things like the little service I built to fetch link metadata. I have a few other ideas for things I think it’d be perfect for, so it’s going on the list for further exploration later.
Thanks for reading, and see you in a couple of weeks!
Stay curious,
— Michele