Hiya! I'm Ishiat, a researcher in the UK. \ As of 10th January, 2026, I find myself in some combination of momentary existentialism, nostalgia, rumination a...
It's a really weird lesson to learn at my big age, but I do need to be more disciplined. A few years ago, I could blame big-web™ and Evil Meta™ for my distractions and my laziness and this that and the other. But now that the reels are gone and the doomscrolling is taken care of, it becomes obvious that the problem is... me‽ (man i love interrobangs hehe) I've spent more time today staring out the…
At the risk of beating a dead horse, I've had a rather pedestrian realization following Kami's post on the red button/blue button hypothetical. A few disclaimers; I agree with Kami on it being an entirely pointless debate, and two: this isn't meant to be an edgy "death come take me, death is great" post, even though at some points it may feel like one. Death is an entirely unknown concept to,…
It's an outfit. I'm making my own fit. For some context: I'm seeing Mitski live later this month, on her NATHTM tour. I love Mitski, and have been a sad-girl-hours-ing to her for about....eight years now? She easily clears my top 3 artists (the other two being Radiohead and Lord Huron), and it feels like being in the same room as her deserves more artsy effort than a Ticketmaster battle. Hence, an…
I turned 23 a couple weeks ago. My brother turned 16 a couple days ago. 23 things I learnt that I wish I could tell myself at 16. You're gay. Your life does not end up looking like you thought it would by any measure. You end up, for the most part, happier than you ever fathomed you could be. There is no award for doing it alone. Only a deafening silence where applause should be. You cannot expect…
It's funny how the mind works, and how simply the way you think about the abstract makes it take an entirely different form. In all candour, this blog was birthed out of a somewhat negative time and space in my brain. It was a new year, and I was increasingly unhappy and dissatisfied (and, admittedly, anxious) by the way my life was shaping up to be. I was in a less-than-ideal job, and on the…
This is a slightly different post than normal, mostly to get this off my chest. Until fairly recently, I'd spent all my life in India. A country that... isn't too well known for it queer rights. Legally, being queer had been criminalized in a rather roundabout way--an act that was only struck down in 2018. Only a couple months after I'd begun to come to terms with my own (non-het) sexuality.…
Today's reading involved a little bit of a trip into my previous research on mitochondrial DNA, in the form of two very old articles titled "Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution" and "In Search of Eve" . For anyone curious enough to go down this rabbithole, the Wiki article on haplogroups is a nice little jump-off point. Human innovation in search of solutions has never ceased to awe me. The…
Today, I read absolutely nothing. Well, nothing to write a blog about. I made some progress on 1984. This blog will now serve as a potentially ill-informed continuation of the last one. Feel absolutely free to correct me on anything I get wrong. The Jiankui He paper isn't published anywhere, as far as I can find. All journals cited ethical issues with publishing his work. He also had to…
Technically, this isn't a Reading Things post; most of what appears in this blog are things I've been aware of for about 5-6 years now, however, today's new piece of reading happens to be this old-ish article speaking out against the atrocities committed by Jiankui He . I also want to make some more progress on 1984, and I'm doing this without a page goal in mind. \ For those unfamiliar, this was…
Today, I read these two lovely research papers: Clinical decisions and outcomes after switching high-sensitivity cardiac troponin assays in suspected acute coronary syndrome: A prospective interrupted time-series study and High-sensitivity cardiac troponin I and risk of dementia: the 25-year longitudinal Whitehall II study . I'm also going to read at least twenty more pages of 1984. Full…