Comment and Link Roundup: April 13, 2020

[brin_bellway]

Comments on my own posts:

[cw: nsfw text, gender dysphoria] The one about the distinction between wanting to fuck someone and wanting to be them

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: amnesia, death] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by i-run-a-trash-blog) Canon-compliant backstory for a hypothetical Doctor Who spinoff.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by moonlit-tulip) The effects of being half-awake on dreams.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by fatpinocchio; in response to jadagul) Browser-autocomplete wrangling.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by sigmaleph) Are we good at computers? Depends on your standard of comparison.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by sigmaleph) A taste of the wonders of Firefox extensions.

[cw: poverty, (arguably) discourse] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by feotakahari) On giving advice that some people desperately need and other people are thoroughly sick of.

[mild cw: embarrassment squick] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by contrarianarchon) With great archiving power comes great archiving responsibility. (Update: writing this comment inspired me to go researching web-scraper programs to see if anyone has one without the "must download each useless page and *then* delete it" problem, and it turns out our old friends ArchiveTeam do. I'm testing it out right now, and after the first couple hours of troubleshooting things seem to be going well.)

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by sigmaleph) In which I offer a bunch of book recs.

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Links:

[none suitable for this section]



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


Comments on my own posts:

The life you save may be your own [one comment, not counting the postscript]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by sigmaleph) How not to tell people to conserve bandwidth.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by sigmaleph) Temporally robust signage.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by siderea; in response to elusiveat and squirrelitude) Pollen-induced sore throats.

[cw: apocalypse, (arguably) discourse] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by collapsedsquid) I'm on board with considering the risk of solar EMPs a problem, but what do we actually *do* about them?

[cw: food] (reverse-post-order glitch) [Tumblr part 1; Tumblr part 2; Wayback part 1; Wayback part 2] (OP by hametronit; in response to rustingbridges) How to get decent matzah; also, what that hat that Jews wear is called. [two comments]

[cw: discourse, (mild) food] [Blogspot; Wayback] (OP by Michael Mock) I finally broke down and publicly told someone off for making disparaging remarks about "early hoarders". Fortunately he took it very well.

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Links:

[cw: poverty] [Vox; Wayback] (by Kelsey Piper) GiveDirectly is orchestrating COVID-19 disaster-relief payments for poor Americans.

[Internet Archive; there are very few situations in which this Wayback copy works but the original link doesn't, but they do have one, so why not] (by Chris Freeland) In recognition of the loss of access caused by quarantining physical libraries, the Internet Archive's copyrighted-ebook library is expanding its selection and reducing its lending restrictions.

[Springer Nature; Wayback] (author unstated; h/t lunartulip) As Tulip puts it: "Springer has decided to give away a few hundred textbooks for free. They've got links to Excel spreadsheets which list and link all the books at https://www.springernature.com/gp/librarians/news-events/all-news-articles/industry-news-initiatives/free-access-to-textbooks-for-institutions-affected-by-coronaviru/17855960, and someone made a bulk-downloader script for them at https://github.com/alexgand/springer_free_books." Unlike the previous link, it looks like you can keep these after quarantine is over, at least if you download them before then.