selfaware soup

Esther Weidauer

Weeks of Fire

Exhaustion, therapeutic miniature painting, a thesis topic, and kinky psychoanalysis

2025-07-19

Building

This week I built and painted a tabletop miniature for the first time in ages. I wanted to do something calm, meditative, and relaxing, so I visited Battlefield Berlin, a local tabletop games shop, and got myself this “Skaven Warp Grinder” set from Warhammer. I don’t actually play the game, although I did play 40K for a little while 20 years ago, which let me just pick a miniature based on vibes and not worry about fitting it into any particular game setup.

I tried out a process called “slapchop” painting where you start with a black coat of primer and then apply a grey color with a dry brush technique so it leaves the deeper recesses of the model dark. After that I added another white dry-brush pass on the upper parts to get some more natural lighting, followed by applying contrast colors. These are thin and runny paints that easily flow into the corners and crevices. This adds deeper tones to the dark parts and works really well on irregular shapes like body parts, clothes, wood, etc.

It worked really well on this kit since it’s almost entirely irregular shapes and rough surfaces. Even the metal parts of the machine are sort of rough and banged-up. I think I could have gotten a bit more interesting effects by priming some parts in something other than black. For example, if the purple crystal parts had a green primer coat, it would give a nice two-tone effect like the part is glowing green from the inside. That’s something to remember for next time.

Although this was already a bit beyoind what is usually called “slapchop” where the goal is to paint a lot of models quickly. I did add things like edge highlighting, more detail work, different skin tones for all three of the characters in the kit, etc.

The process was everything I had hoped for. I got entirely lost in it, didn’t think about anything else for a couple of hours, and got to be proud of a thing I had done well in the end. Therapeutic miniature painting.

Burning

And it sure was necessary. The past few weeks have been burning the candle at both ends for me, while the candle also sat on a hot stove. I was extremely busy with university stuff as a lot of seminars came to and end with assignments I had to complete and presentations to give. All while the spectre of upcoming exams was looming.

I ended up pushing one more exame back to early October so now I just need to prepare for one and the other two of this semester can get proper time and attention during august and September.

There was also a whole bunch of personal stuff going on the got in the way of things and drained me even more, some of which I’m still recovering from. I was just out of mental energy and needed a little reset before locking in for exam preparations.

Lifting

This week I hit a significant milestone for me: a 100kg barbell squat.

I had been slowly working towards that for weeks, adding 2.5kg from time to time in order to safely get there without hurting myself.

After a recent deload-week, where I only worked with lower weights to give my joints and tendons a break, I went pack to heavy loads and felt much stronger. The 100kg squat felt really solid, not just like I could barely do it.

Analysis

One thing I worked on recently and that really stuck with me was a presentation for a seminar on psychoanalytic sexual theory. It had been going on the whole semester and covered a lot of literature from various psychoanalysts from the early 20th century to present day works.

I gave a presentation on a paper titled “On sexual perversions’ capacity to act as portal to psychic states that have evaded representation” by Greek psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou who is definitely one of the modern ones, much to my relief because I can only take so much from old white cis men who desperately try to force everything through their narrow framework.

She picks up concepts from a few earlier scholars about how some things are so raw and unprocessed in our minds that they are not even available to the subconscious, entirely unthinkable, and therefore also impossible to work with in a therautic setting. They can however be processed into thinkable material through what W. R. Bion calls “alpha-functions”: processes that convert the unthinkable “beta-elements” into thinkable “alpha-elements”. Althoug these shouldn’t be taken too literally but as a model. A classical psychoanalytic example would be parents mirroring their children’s affects and thereby provinding the necessary context for the child to understand these affects and their meaning.

Saketopoulou proposes another way this could happen. She brings up a case from her own practice where a patient had an intense BDSM experience with her partner which ends up unlocking previously unavailable thoughts to her and in turn to the psychoanalyst. I want to share that particular quote:

(content warning: BDSM, kink, needles, bondage)

In this particular encounter Cyra positioned Ann naked with her back against the wall. Ann was blindfolded and her hands were tied behind her back. Cyra proceeded to use hypodermic needles to pierce Ann on both sides of her naked body starting below Ann’s collarbone, continuing all the way down to her thighs. Cyra then removed her own clothing. Standing naked across her partner, she pierced her own body in a symmetrical way. After she was done, Cyra laced a latex string through the corresponding needles on both of their bodies. The needles on Cyra’s right side were intricately threaded through those on Ann’s left side and the same on the other side with a different string. When this elaborate ritual was completed Cyra removed Ann’s blindfold. Ann looked down to take in the intricate bondage connecting their bodies. When she met Cyra’s gaze again, Cyra took a gentle step back causing the strings to become taut. Gently but firmly, the strings pulled on their skins raising them some and resulting in a mildly painful sensation.

The act of being literally inter-woven with her partner’s body leads Saketopoulou to pick up another concept called “inter-embodyment” (Hartmann, 2010). It is proposed as an analog to inter-subjectivity, the idea that we experience the world and ourselves not in isolation but also through other people. Inter-embodyment extends this idea to the physical, as literally having physical experiences throug someone else’s body.

I highly recommend reading the paper and I’ll very much look into more of Saketopoulou’s work.

Thesis

I have the topic for my bachelor’s thesis: Assurance-based sample size planning in psychological research.

I wrote a thread about what that means roughly:

So, what is this “assurance”? Let’s take a step back and look at power analysis first:

When planning a confirmatory trial (one that attempts to confirm or reject a specific hypothesis, so not an exploratory one), you need to know how many people you need: your sample size.

In general, small effects require large samples in order to be significant. Larger effects require less.

Based on a previous trial, like an exploratory pilot study, or on existing theoretical work, you decide what the smallest meaningful effect is for your study.

Effect size is usually the mean difference between the control group and the treatment group on some outcome variable you’re interested in, e.g. reading performance in 3rd grade kids with and without some new reading training program.

Let’s say you measure the time kids need to read a certain piece of text out loud without mistakes. If your training improves that by at least 10 seconds, you consider that meaningful. That number can come from previous similar trials, or from a theoretical model.

Your effect size is 10.

You also know from previous studies how much reading speed varies because people aren’t robots, some just read faster than others, and it also varies day to day in each person. Maybe the standard deviation of the reading time in your case is 20.

Next you define your alpha-level, or type-1 error rate. usually that’s set to 5%. It’s the probability that your sample will show at least your minimum effect (10) or more, although it doesn’t actually exist.

A false positive result due to random variation. Maybe the kids had a really good day.

Next you set your beta-level, or type-2 error rate. The probability of not finding your effect in the sample although it does exist.

A false negative. Maybe don’t test kids’ reading performance on a Monday morning, jackass.

Doing some math, which you can look up if you care that much, you can obtain a sample size that is necessary so that those alpha and beta probabilities work out for your standardized effect size of 0.5 (because effect is 10 and standard deviation is 20), which is a really solid effect size.

In our example, in a simple means trial (just comparing group averages), for an alpha level of 5% and a beta level of 20% (meaning a “power” of 80%) we get a minimum sample size of 51 per group, so 102 in total.

Totally doable if you have a couple schools who are willing to assist. Yay!

So, the problem here (at the one I’m getting at) is that the original estimation of 0.5 for standardized effect (10 in absolute terms) is a guess. It might be an educated guess, but it’s absolutely not a precisely known quantity.

Maybe you read a bunch of papers that report similar effects, or you ran a pilot study that yielded this result. But if you repeated that pilot study multiple times, you’d probably get different effect sizes due to random variance from all sorts of uncontrolled error variables.

The effect size is not a fixed value. It follows a statistical distribution.

The input of a classical power analysis is a single value: expected effect size, and the output is also a single value: required sample size.

If the input is now a probability distribution of infinite possible effect sizes, the output is also a distribution of the probability of correctly rejecting the null hypothesis (the hypothesis that there is no effect), which is conditional on the effect size.

This probability is called assurance.

This is a simple example where the only input parameter is effect size. However there can be more. The assurance distribution then becomes higher-dimensional and much harder to compute in an analytical way. It is then often estimated through simulations instead.

Assurance has a tendency to be lower than classical power for the same trial, and would therefore dictate a higher sample size. The resulting issue is that studies which rely on classical power run the risk of being systematically under-powered, meaning their sample sizes are insufficient.

Assurance also means something else than power.

Power is the probability of finding a sample that matches the hypothesis of the effect, assuming the effect exists. It is a statement about data.

Assurance is the probability of a trial producing a significant result. A statement about method.

If you’re planning a trial and want it to produce a significant positive result (and what scientist doesn’t want? It’s what gets you published), then assurance more relevant, and it’ll help you select a sample size that doesn’t under-power (which is bad) or over-power (which is expensive) your trial

In pharmaceutical research, assurance is already quite well known, but not at all in psychology. Unless specifically looking for it, I’ve not seen any psych papers use it.

This is the point of my thesis: to bridge that gap somewhat and make an assurance-based approach usable for psychologists.

So, that’s what I’ll be working on for the next … hopefully mcuh less than a year. I’m extremely glad that I found a topic that doesn’t require any data collection because that stuff takes so much time, especially when it involves getting people into a lab for some experiment. Instead this work will be mostly theory, literature, and some programming in R.

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