Comment and Link Roundup: January 21, 2022

[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 rustingbridges) Making your home's heating robust against electricity outages. (Despite what you might think, having a natural-gas furnace is actually pretty useless for this.) [three comments]

[cw: corporate bullshit] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by siderea) Tips on wresting control of your smartphone back from the corps.

[cw: poverty, (arguably) death] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by spacefroggity) Is the availability of cheap gemstones (thanks to lab-growing techniques) good? Depends on what jewellery is for.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by rustingbridges) Getting used to OpenStreetMaps.

[cw: poverty, homelessness, discourse (earlier in thread)] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by muchnerve; in response to togglessymposium) What would a world that outlawed long-term rental of living space look like?

[arguably cw: poverty] [Modern FImily; Wayback] (OP by Court and Adam) Self-knowledge is key to a fulfilling life.

(I mean also I kind of *do* feel deprived, but largely because I'm not saving *enough*, seeing as how it's not mathematically possible to save enough when you're only making like ten grand a year in the first place. But that's another matter, and not something I really wanted to get into there: I basically wrote that comment in character as probable-medium-term-future!me. And I *am* better off than in, like, 2017, so there's that.)

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Links:

[arguably cw: amnesia] [Medway Music; Wayback] (by Steve Cole) A guide on how to preserve your local music scene using the Internet Archive.



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


Comments on my own posts:

Set and setting

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Comments on other people's posts:

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by star-trek-dumb-comics) The shifting(?) meanings of the verb "to lick doorknobs".

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Links:

[cw: murder, poison] [BBC; Wayback] (by Soutik Biswas) Man (back in 1930s) tries to kill brother by deliberately (and rather blatantly) infecting him with tetanus. Brother pulls through. Man jumps through a zillion fucking hoops to fraudulently obtain a sample of fucking *bubonic plague*, infects his brother with *that*, and that time the brother dies. I spent much of the article thinking "just use *arsenic* or some shit, god*damn*." (The article claims he used germs as a murder weapon because he thought it would be harder to pin on him, but, uh, stabbing somebody with poisoned sharps does not really seem any more subtle just because the poison in question is self-replicating? Was he just, like, *really* committed to the aesthetic?)

[cw: fire, apocalypse] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (post by siderea; photo by Wendy Cordova) A striking image of hospital staff looking out a window at a wildfire in the distance. Sometimes reality is more allegorical than fiction.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (by siderea) Here's to building the better world that we have always deserved. Our suffering is not inevitable: the future is bright and shining and *clean*, and we--each of us--need only reach out and take it. I, for one, will never settle for tainted air again.

(As for the details of the post, I did look into DIY air purifiers recently, and they didn't actually seem significantly cheaper than buying a pre-built one: I think the materials may be more expensive in Canada. I'll check again either after my brother moves out (at which point I will move into his (larger) bedroom, stop having a loft bed, and will no longer be able to hide the sleep-disturbingly-bright lights of an Aeramax DX5 by placing it *underneath* my bed) or when I reach a large enough combination of disposable-income and tired-of-hauling-my-only-air-purifier-up-and-down-the-stairs-every-day that I decide to buy a second purifier.)