Comment and Link Roundup: November 17, 2021

[brin_bellway]

Comments on my own posts:

[none suitable for this section]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by tentacion1999: I suspect it was actually stolen from some non-Tumblrite, but I was unable to track down who) Shadows cast by the sun shining directly downward (not *necessarily* at the equator).

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by argumate) Matt Levine is in Hell and we are all just watching; recounting the story of my own brushes with cryptocurrency.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by transgenderer) Terra Ignota characters and the workings of Ada Palmer's mind.

[cw: food] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by feotakahari) Concerning and/or intriguing ideas for pizza toppings.

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Links:

[cw: bugs (with pictures)] [ScienceNews; Wayback] (by Betsy Mason) The sensorium of jumping spiders.

[Forbes; Wayback] (by Ethan Siegel) There are two subtly different kinds of shoelace knot, and one of them is much more prone to coming loose than the other. Turns out I have been using the wrong one: I'll have to try another practice hike now that I know, although I'm pretty sure *some* of my issues are in fact from the shoelaces getting old and stretched-out.



There is a blanket [cw: illness] on the rest of this post.


Comments on my own posts:

[cw: death, poison, (fairly mild) drugs] On deliberately *not* poisoning oneself [two comments]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by embryu; in response to itsbenedict) An angel fighting the holy fight against plague (or: people looking at a picture and going "oh yeah, like that one person I know" is the first step to normalising something).

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by finestoftheflavors; in response to necarion) Which vaccines to get; also, keeping written records of your medical concerns is great both for keeping track of them and for being able to just hand notes to people when you need to explain stuff. [two or three comments, depending on how you count]

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by dankmemeuniversity) Characters in alien movies behaving incredibly recklessly; meanwhile, in glowfic...

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Links:

[none this time]

Comments

[thedarlingone]

It had not occurred to me that people who didn't have an intense special interest in sailing ships for much of their youth might not know the difference between the shoelace knots. :P I started tying my shoes with a reef knot (technically it's a slipped reef knot or maybe a double-slipped reef knot, if I remember) when I was maybe eight, as soon as I noticed that's what a shoe bow in fact was, and when I was a walking tortoise I could reliably do about a mile before my laces would begin to come loose. If that helps for comparison at all, maybe.

Edit: As long as we're on the topic of shoelaces, flat ones stay tied a fuckton longer than round ones, controlling for using the same type of knot. I always swap out my round laces for flat ones when I can, length and aesthetic allowing.

[brin_bellway]

At that age I couldn't wrap my head around *any* shoelace knot. I gave up around 9 or 10, then tried again at 15 and that time it clicked.

I'll bear the flat-vs-round thing in mind, thanks. Not that it's going to matter if I can't figure out a way to remove the current shoelaces: they've been stuck the entire time I've owned them. I'm not sure what went wrong during their time with the previous owner: road-salt impregnation, maybe? I found the reef-knot article while searching for advice on this, but couldn't find anything relevant to my actual question.