Brinens and Things

Comments on my own posts:

[cw: discourse, ableism, racism] The one about name pronunciation [four comments, three of which are new]

[cw: poverty] On Universal Basic Income [two comments]

Interesting Fact Meme [four comments]

[cw: amnesia] The one about 1984 and measurement systems

---

Comments on other people's posts:

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by sigmaleph) The intricacies of currency exchange. [two comments]

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by wingedcatgirl) Vibrant areas of social media, and making currently dormant areas more vibrant.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by paxamericana; in response to Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal) Subscription audits and self-awareness.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by contrarianarchon) Cultural osmosis; finding new things to read.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by contrarianarchon) Books we were not ready for, and possibly will never be ready for.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by staff) Automattic (the WordPress people) are taking Tumblr off of Oath's hands, which ties the fates of Tumblr and WordPress a little closer together than I'd like.

[cw: food] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by wolffyluna) Having lots of freezer space is good.

---

Links:

[Uncanny Magazine; Wayback] (by Sarah Pinsker, which is apparently *not* a pseudonymic conceit but the author's longstanding name; I only just realised this now) I'd been hearing praise for "that Hugo nominee where there's a murder at a convention of alternate-universe selves" and was a bit curious, but hadn't realised it was freely available. For those of you in the same boat, here it is. (I read it and enjoyed it.)

[TASTE; Wayback] (by Mari Uyehara) Different brands of kosher salt have significantly different densities: exercise caution when following recipes that don't specify which brand of kosher salt they were normed on. (I wonder what Windsor's density is: this article is aimed at Americans and doesn't say. *googles* Well, here's a chart from Windsor comparing the density of its kosher salt to that of table salt, from which the density relative to other kosher salts can presumably be deduced.)

(I left the previous post in my drafts for a little while, and new things have happened in the meantime.)

[cw: government bullshit, arguably poverty]

( Read more... )

Comments on my own posts:

The first part of the Runescape liveblogging [three comments]

The one about Ed Sheeran

The one about accumulating software prerequisites

---

Comments on other people's posts:

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by tilthat; in response to sophus-b) The Pope Rap continues to be great.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by inu-fiction; in response to maryellencarter) Consider Wordpress for image hosting. (Though since my new DW images are sharing storage space with my Tumblr backup, I *am* worried I'm going to run out of media-storage space on my account, after 7+ years of Tumbling. I've mentioned in Tumblr tags a couple times that I'm a lot more reluctant to reblog posts with images now, proportionately to how many images and how many frames they have: I have to think about whether it's worth the space.)

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by rustingbridges) Did you know they make shaker bottles of finely ground salt, the better to stick to popcorn kernels?

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by gasmaskaesthetic) Have you ever set yourself on fire for fun? (No.)

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by sophus) I inspired somebody else to start making sure the Internet Archive had copies of all their links! (And Sophus uses the laugh rule, too, so that's *two* blogging practices they got from me! I love being a positive influence.)

(For those of you who don't know, I invented the laugh rule. (Quite possibly other people in other places have invented it independently, but from the timeline of events† I strongly suspect that every laugh-rule-using rationalist can trace it back to me.) It's been very gratifying to see other people picking it up, to see the positive impact I've had on the community, to know I've inspired people to make the world a bit more joyful.)

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by ilzolende; in response to contrarianarchon) Approaches to browser tab management. [three comments]

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by nuclearspaceheater; in response to rustingbridges) Left vs right shift keys, long-ago typos, and different approaches social-media websites can take. [three comments, two of which are new]

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by redbeardace; in response to rustingbridges) The first-degree-ask bug remains unfixed and poorly documented; also, reblogs without commentary don't use up the bugginess. [two comments, one of which is new]

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by feotakahari; in response to archonofquandaries) There is a time and a place for reading hot political takes, and it is *not* while looking for porn. [two comments, one of which is new]

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by contrarianarchon) Dreamwidth and angle brackets, it turns out, do not mix.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by contrarianarchon) Bloxp is glitchy, but sometimes useful (at least in theory). [two comments]

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by moral-autism; in response to serinemolecule and theopjones) The relative usefulness of laptops and smartphones in different situations. [five comments, four of which are new]

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by voxette-vk) How to operate a doorknob with no hands.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (in response to agapi42) Lying about your age for fun and profit. (If by profit, you mean chocolate.)

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by contrarianarchon) Wife-husband team Ursula Vernon and Kevin Sonney make some very nice podcasts.

---

Links:

[Uncanny Magazine; Wayback] (by Vina Jie-Min Prasad; h/t flakesesomlys) A mostly-fluffy short story about a sapient robot getting into fandom.

[Atlantic; Wayback] (by Ed Yong) Appetite suppressants originally intended for humans might also work on Aedes aegypti?

Highlighted comment:
sophus uses music jargon to explain why Ed Sheeran sounds so different in different songs.

Laugh rule:
youzicha shares a Reddit thread about people who may or may not be Eliezer Yudkowsky.

---

†Back when I was the only person I knew of who did it, multiple rationalists cited it as a thing they particularly liked about my blog.

We begin our story in 2012, when a game known as Find the Airport swept Tumblr.

There was (technically, still is) a website called MapCrunch. If you went to MapCrunch, it would display a random spot on Google Street View. You could interact with it in the normal Street View ways: move around, zoom in and out. You could, optionally, have MapCrunch not tell you where the spot was.

In Find the Airport, you set MapCrunch to anonymised-map mode, got your random spot, and attempted to navigate to an airport. (The idea being that you had awoken in an unknown location and had to make your way home.)

While Find the Airport had its good aspects and *was* possible to win (I won once, finding an airport in southern France), the mid-late game was often a long, frustrating slog. While there was always the possibility of finding a neat thing to take a screenshot of and post on your blog (and many did), the fun parts were almost all at the beginning, in which you attempted to figure out from contextual clues where MapCrunch had put you.

---

Enter the successor† to Find the Airport: GeoGuessr. In GeoGuessr, you're plunked down in an anonymised bit of Google Street View, and the explicit, site-supported goal is to figure out where you are from contextual clues. When you are ready to guess, you can place a pin on a zoomable world map. The site will then give you a point score based on your pin's crow-flight distance from the actual location.

It's still up to you how much assistance you're willing to allow yourself. Personally, I find it most fun to play by a rule of "I can use everything except other Google Maps tabs". Each round is a hunt for clues, often in seemingly-innocuous things, that I can stick into a search engine or look up on Wikipedia. Don't get me wrong, there's definitely a certain gratification in finding that you already know everything you need to know to deduce your location, but playing with assistance is part of how you learn those things you need to know.

There are a bunch of modes, competing against other players or on certain restricted maps, but I haven't tried them myself: I just stick to the classic one-player all-maps mode.

It's a fun puzzle, and a nice way to learn some neat bits of geography and explore places you might never have thought to look at otherwise. And if, like me, you enjoy the puzzle aspect of stalking people but refrain for ethical reasons, you might find this fills a similar mental niche. Bits of Google Map, after all, don't mind if you doxx them. :)

---

This post brought to you by playing a game of GeoGuessr and getting within a few kilometres on all five rounds. Take that, rural Australia!

(it also helps that I'm American enough to recognise an outline of Ohio on a state-highway road sign)

---

†Although I'm not sure if it was *intended* as a successor, or if it was a convergent-evolution thing.