[identity0]

The top pattern is extremely common so comments are somewhat unnecessary since everyone would know what you're doing. In the second one, comments would be less necessary with a type annotation and perhaps a better name. Maybe "next_ptr" instead of "indirect"---all pointers are indirection, so that name is redundant. But the comments are necessary, to me at least.

[eperdew]

All pointers are pointers too, so I don't see much of a difference between "indirect" and "next_ptr", other than the "next" part. In similar situations at my job, I've drawn a small ASCII diagram in the comments, and named the variable something like "splice_point", with a corresponding label in the diagram.

[identity0]

Well "next_ptr" is also a bad name, I agree, but I'm trying to name it something that indicates "this is a pointer to the 'next' pointer in the linked list".

[scns]

How about next_node?