Recent content in Home on The wild broccoli 🥦
Introduction 
 Emperor Huizong of the Song dynasty is generally remembered in popular history as a comically tragic (or tragically comic) figure: the emperor who disappeared into a fantasy world of fine art while his empire crumbled around him, ultimately losing the northern half of the empire to barbarian conquest by the Jurchens. However, this is a flattening of a complicated and…
After a while, I finally came up with an idea for a game. Of course, this is the easy part, and now I must do the hard work of actually creating the game, the art, and everything else. I think it’ll be fun, because I have no game development experience other than making silly little Twine and Ren’Py text adventure-type games and visual novel experiments. I suppose that’s a little…
Happy April Fools’ Day! There is no prank for today, as I am too old at heart 1 to come up with this kind of thing. I also think that the sort of prank I can think of that would affect this blog might be sort of malicious and annoying towards the viewer. And of course, dear reader, I could not bear to do something like that to you! 
 Due to various reasons, I’ve started falling…
So this was probably imperceptible to anyone who read my site but I actually had the flex: parameter mis-specified in my CSS file this whole time, which made it so that I couldn’t write blog post titles that were too long… or else something bad would happen. Something evil. Because of this I’ve been keeping my titles very short just in case. 
 OK, it's not that bad. It would…
I have always been interested in margin notes, ever since I was a young child reading the annotated edition of Dracula . Ever since then, I’ve searched for books where the pages are filled with little extras and bonuses, though usually they are footnotes or endnotes, which are not quite as delightful to read as the beloved side note. Gwern’s site uses side notes quite extensively, and…
I decided to follow up the previous questionnaire with another questionnaire. This one was written by stupied.neocities.org and you can find the blank version here if you would like to fill it out yourself. If you do, please tell me! It’s fun to see what people have to say about the way they do things. Now, I wonder if I make enough art these days to even call myself an artist…
I found this fun little questionnaire on MOUSELING.net and decided to fill it out. Here’s a blank version if you’d like to fill it out yourself. Please let me know if you do, and I’ll read it too!
I said that I would update my blog soon, but three months passed and I let the blog lie fallow. As spring has come, my website layout emerged from the snowy winter to grow new flowers. 
 Last semester, I ended up withdrawing from a difficult course due to poor health. Perhaps you were on tenterhooks all these months reading about the medical mystery that plagued me. Was it rheumatic fever? Was…
Hello world! It’s been a while. Finals season was upon me. I’m 100% done with one of my final projects, I completed one of my exams this morning, and I’m 80% done with the next final project. Coming up next week is my very last final exam. I’ll have to write a bunch of essays… I hate writing essays! But I’ll do my best anyway. If I do poorly, then I’ll do…
I really like Neocities. I love that I can use a command-line tool to automate building my site with Hugo and pushing it to the web. 
 Recently there was a kerfluffle with Neocities where a bug broke iframes for non-supporter accounts. I’m a supporter so I can upload mp3 files and because in general I want Neocities to live and work out, so I wasn’t affected. But it did make me…
The Thanksgiving break has ended and I have returned to New Haven once more. The double Thanksgiving with my family and my husband’s family was delightful and lovely, though I found most of my time monopolized by my little sister, who attached herself to me like glue and plaintively called out “Where are you, Veronica?” whenever I got up to get some food. It was very cute. Four…
On Monday afternoon, my husband, my stepfather, and I made the long drive from New Haven to Central Virginia so we could return home for Thanksgiving to see our families. It’s really lucky that both my husband’s and my parents live in the same county, so we can always have Thanksgiving together. My father and his new family also live in that same county too, but I’ve never had…
This might be silly, but I love converting everything to Hugo shortcodes. It’s fun to figure out how to pass arguments to the shortcode so I can create replicable, customizable snippets of website code. So when I found out that Hugo will automatically escape quotes in the {{ .Inner }} if you put it in Javascript, I decided to go for a little walk in the help documents. For reference, I…
After many delays, including my hospital stay, I finally finished knitting a hat for my husband! It took twice as long as a normal hat because it’s the famous double-layered Musselburgh hat which I knit with fingering weight yarn. 
 Here’s the Ravelry listing and a photo of the finished hat! Maybe it’s hard to tell from the photo, but it’s super warm, to the point that…
I spent the weekend leisurely and visited the Yale Center for British Art, which had a special exhibit on William Blake’s work. 
 
 Blake’s printmaking technique was unparalleled. I loved looking at the use of complementary colors in each version of his prints; some were printed in orange ink and used blue watercolor, others were printed in green ink and used warm hues in the…
Shortly after writing my last blog entry, I fell ill again. It was like a stroke of lightning, just like all the other times. On Friday, I felt well; I went with my husband to see the movie Bugonia (which was very good, and I recommend it); we walked around in the cold and dark together and viewed the movie posters for the upcoming winter in anticipation. The next day, Saturday, I felt feverish…
This week I had another exam, this time in epidemiology. I find the epidemiology course both easy and difficult because I have just enough background knowledge to know the concepts but also have historically used them differently in extremely specific contexts so my intuition can end up being wrong. 
 Neocities continues to give me 503 errors when I use the CLI to upload my site, so I cannot…
As promised, here are some pictures of my travels to Massachusetts. All photos were taken by my husband, who is much better at photography than me! Except the ones that are of him. 
 
 
 I took the train to Boston without much event, other than the Amtrak line being delayed as usual. There, I met up with my husband and our friend Matt, whose aunt and uncle live in the area. From there,…
Happy Halloween to everyone who celebrates! Today I am going to be dressed up as a pumpkin. I tried something very out-of-character for me and put on makeup as part of the costume. Yes, it’s silly, but I really have no talent for cosmetics, so even drawing an eyeliner wing and gluing on false eyelashes was a daunting task that took up a great deal of focus and mental fortitude. Because I now…
For work, I mostly use Stata and a little bit of R and Mplus. I’ve been learning SQL and SAS in school as well, which is pretty conceptually similar to Stata. However, the SAS syntax is no fun for me, so I will continue to appreciate that my job lets me use Stata instead. 
 The ado-files that I write are largely tiny utilities that define macros that I like to use over and over again.…
Castleman disease ( CD ) describes a group of rare lymphoproliferative disorders that involve enlarged lymph nodes, and a broad range of inflammatory symptoms and laboratory abnormalities. Whether Castleman disease should be considered an autoimmune disease, cancer, or infectious disease is currently unknown. 1 
 
 
 “We could do a full body CT scan but we don’t like doing…
Today I signed up for Atabook 1 , which is a creation of Nekoweb 2 , a competitor to Neocities. I’m an old person, so I don’t know about these newer static site hosts. I also don’t really draw a lot of anime fanart or anything like that anymore, so I don’t fit in with a lot of the flashy Neocities blogs which function as portfolios for up and coming young artists. 
 My…
Hello world; here is my first blog post. I have spent a fairly good amount of time customizing my blog layout, and it is almost time to release the blog into the world. I am feeling tempted to change all of the fonts again, but I really like the look of MS PGothic. Please let me know if there is an issue on non-Windows devices; I do not own a Mac device and do not care to, so my ability to test…
About broccoli 
 Brassica oleracea , also known as wild cabbage in its uncultivated form, is a plant of the family Brassicaceae. The species originated from feral populations of related plants in the Eastern Mediterranean, where it was most likely first cultivated. It has many common cultivars used as vegetables, including cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, romanesco, kale, Brussels sprout,…



Some light reading 
 Publications 
 
 Cheville AL, et al. “ Electronic health record-facilitated symptom surveillance and collaborative care intervention in oncology (E2C2): a cluster-randomized, population-level, stepped-wedge, pragmatic trial ”. The Lancet Oncology. 2025 Dec. 1 
 
 
 Electronic health record (EHR)-facilitated collaborative care layered with symptom…
Microblog 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Changelog 
 2026/05/04 
 
 Added moon phase calculation to the blog posts 
 
 2026/04/13 
 
 Added something very small to the footer of the page 
 
 2026/03/26 
 
 Updated the blog page index, perhaps optimistically hoping that I will continue to update my page for many years to come 
 Updated webgarden to prune 404 pots 
 I will at some point…

 Indie Web Neighbors 
 
	 
	 
	 
	 
	 
	 
 
Actually, I have more neighbors I'd like to add, but I couldn't find buttons on their sites. I'll keep looking... Or I could create placeholder buttons instead?
 Webgarden 
 A webgarden is a tiny little slice of your website that…

 Fill your website with Pikmin! 
 I’m a huge fan of Pikmin Bloom. It’s a great game to track how much you walk and where you choose to go, so I love planting little flowers everywhere I go whenever possible! I reached level 100 a little while ago, so now I’m grinding through the post-level 100 missions to reach the max level. Hopefully once I reach the final level…