Belated Question of the Day: December 13, 2018

questionoftheday asks: Does your family have any unique holiday traditions? What's the story behind them?

My answer: For Rosh Hashanah, we bake a birthday cake for the world. Weather permitting, we take it outside and have the wind blow it out.

For New Year's Eve, we eat a chocolate orange. Originally this was because we had usually picked one up on Boxing Day (just about the only time they're reasonably priced), but the tradition has fossilised enough that when Sobey's had a post-Easter sale on chocolate oranges and we saw they didn't expire until January, we went ahead and bought our New Year's orange then. It's been sitting in the cupboard since spring, and its time has almost come.

(no subject)

I should probably learn Markdown at some point, that seems to be the Thing To Do, but for now I'm actually kind of enjoying using HTML again after dealing with rich-text for so long. It's nice to be able to just pre-format my notepad drafts, without having to use notes-to-self like "{{put link to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ here}}".

(...let me guess, Tumblr's actually had an HTML option this whole time, hasn't it)

(...goddammit)

Comment and Link Roundup: December 18, 2018

Comments on my own posts:

Okay, folks, let's get this show on the road.

The one in which I get IP-banned from Tumblr [comment 1]

The one in which I get IP-banned from Tumblr [comment 2]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[Tumblr; Wayback] No, Dreamwidth is not just as prone to linkrot as Pillowfort.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by nightpool) Another post on ArchiveTeam's Tumblr-scraping project.

(Re: the ArchiveTeam thing, I gather that some people are [viscerally horrified by the idea of] or [otherwise don't want] their Tumblr ending up on the Internet Archive. While I do not remotely grok this feel--surely the viscerally horrifying idea is that of your Tumblr *not* being archived?--I will note that the Internet Archive accepts takedown requests at info@archive.org.

Also, the Tumblr project is ongoing: while it's too late to save the NSFW *images* of the remaining sex blogs, they can still save the other posts (and let's face it, almost nobody trusts Tumblr not to eventually purge the rest too, either through censorship or through just pulling another Geocities). And even after the Tumblr project either completes or is forced to stop for good, ArchiveTeam has several other projects running, and I for one intend to continue helping out now that I know that's a thing.)

[Tumblr; Wayback] (in response to dreamwidth-help) The backstory behind my "How to Backup Your Dreamwidth" post.

[cw: apocalypse] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by femmenietzsche) The Sentinelese guard us against God.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by oligopsony) Competitive RTS (Real-Time Strategy) players give a new-to-me perspective on the genre.

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Links:

[Tor; Wayback] (by Michael Livingston) A sporking† of Braveheart.

[Y Combinator; Wayback] (OP by user patio11, but read the whole thread) Starfleet as an in-universe LARP. (Note: the canonical 47th Rule of Acquisition is "Don't trust a man wearing a better suit than your own", which is...actually not entirely unlike "never, ever, ever bet against the humans", particularly given that the thread is emphasising how vast the resources and power of the Federation are.)

[cw: nsfw text] [Tumblr; Wayback] (I know who wrote this, and it's not a *secret* per se, but I'm not sure if he wants his identity to be *obvious* either) A review of virtual-reality porn, written by an asexual.

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†We're on a Livejournal fork, everything old is new again, I can call it a sporking if I want.