{"id":6559,"date":"2025-03-16T21:59:33","date_gmt":"2025-03-17T04:59:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.xephalon.net\/updates\/?p=6559"},"modified":"2025-06-01T20:42:48","modified_gmt":"2025-06-02T03:42:48","slug":"bracing-ourselves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.xephalon.net\/updates\/2025\/03\/16\/bracing-ourselves\/","title":{"rendered":"Bracing Ourselves"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>With my parents still in town, my wife and I were able to take respective work trips to Philly<\/a> and Miami<\/a>. Melody’s visit to Independence Hall led her to the National Constitution Center’s<\/a> podcast<\/a>, where discussions of DOGE<\/a> and presidential power helped shed light on the evolving challenges to my own research, including the rejection of my foreign post-doc’s visa and cancellation of the NIH<\/a> council to fund my new grant. At work, I welcomed<\/a> a new technician, consoled my overwhelmed grad student, and cheered on a resident at her concert<\/a> along with our own pianist-in-training. We were glad that Westley adapted quickly to his first set of braces<\/a>, which allowed us to try out new restaurants like Pho Yummy<\/a>, Tasty Pot<\/a>, and Seapot<\/a>. At home, we continued planning for our spring and summer vacations and competed online for summer camp<\/a> openings. We were distracted, however, by episodes of The Day of the Jackal<\/a> and season 3 of the White Lotus<\/a>, where Lisa’s first acting role contrasted with her rapper<\/a> persona, and the likes of other Kpop girl groups we like including NewJeans<\/a>, Le Sserafim<\/a>, IVE<\/a>, XG<\/a>, and ILLIT<\/a>. Our other new after-hours obsession has been Baldur’s Gate 3<\/a>. Larian Studios<\/a>‘ role-playing adventure faithfully adapted the D&D<\/a> tabletop mechanics down to the 20-sided die-roll on screen, which helped immerse us in the Forgotten Realm. Along with Astarion, Gale, and Karlach, we set out to rid ourselves of our mindflayer tadpoles, and hope that escapism could help us deal with the growing existential threat to science and higher education.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With my parents still in town, my wife and I were able to take respective work trips to Philly and Miami. Melody’s visit to Independence Hall led her to the National Constitution Center’s podcast, where discussions of DOGE and presidential … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xephalon.net\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xephalon.net\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xephalon.net\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xephalon.net\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xephalon.net\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6559"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.xephalon.net\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6650,"href":"https:\/\/www.xephalon.net\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6559\/revisions\/6650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xephalon.net\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xephalon.net\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xephalon.net\/updates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}