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Some months ago my elbow started hurting. (The little bump on the inside of my elbow joint was where it hurt.) I don’t think it was a sword-fighting injury; I think it was a dog-walking injury—but the sword fighting seemed to aggravate it.

A sword bag on the floor holding two rapiers and two longswords

So I did less sword fighting. I switched from three times a week to just twice, and then just once, and then I quit going altogether. Then last week I traveled to Amherst to visit my brother and my mom, and just about didn’t exercise at all while I was on that trip. My elbow got steadily better, so that for about a week now, it hasn’t hurt at all.

So yesterday I went back for a sword-fighting class!

The class was kind of abbreviated. At the beginning of class we did a bearpit for a member’s birthday, so I got to do three passes at longsword. Then we did an actual class on rapier fencing. Then we were going to switch to longsword, but there was a tornado warning, and we all stopped to stare at our phones, looking at weather radar and texts with friends and relations in the area, making sure we were all okay.

Turns out that’s just a well. My elbow seemed to hold up fine during class, but today it’s a bit twingey again, so I’m glad I didn’t aggravate it more.

This pretty clearly means I’m not ready to go back to three-times-a-week training, but maybe it doesn’t rule out once-a-week training.

I’ll see how my elbow feels over the next few days.

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“… food delivery giant DoorDash announced a deal Thursday with buy-now, pay-later outfit Klarna, offering hungry consumers “the added convenience of Klarna’s seamlessly integrated, flexible payment options while shopping.”

Source: Almost Daily Grant’s Commentary

Of course. Who doesn’t think it’s a good idea to spread the cost of your lunch over a few weeks or months?

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I’d like an app that could take my various social media feeds, the RSS feeds I used to follow (until my feed reader broke), and the various news sources that I subscribe to, and find all the articles that I really want to read, and present them to me in a useful order.

Of course it needs to do a lot more than that. It should watch me read them, pay attention to which posts I linger on, which ones I follow internal links in, etc., and try to learn what I actually want to read. (And then give me more of that stuff in the future.)

It would also be nice if it noticed when I read something by a new person I don’t follow (because it was boosted by someone I do follow), and consider following that person as well.

And by “in a useful order,” I mean the AI should understand which articles are full of background information versus covering the latest breaking news, and present the background information first—unless it’s background information that I already know. In that latter case, it should just offer a link to the background information, in case I feel like I need a refresher. It should also present the information grouped by topic (so, news first, then economics/business news, then science news, then the very narrow sorts of cultural news that I want to read).