Brinens and Things

reincarnation-verse fic while looking for porn.

(apparently the title character limit is too short)

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"before they convinced you life is war", by EclipseWing. Harry Potter characters reincarnated into a more-or-less X-Men universe: if you had magic in the old world, you get a mutant power in this one. Amoral read-write empath Tom Riddle and (initially) reluctant mind-controller Harry Potter must team up to escape the re-education facility they're trapped in and survive in a mutant-hating world, despite remembering enough of their respective past lives to be well aware of their status as mortal enemies.

It's a little unpolished, but mostly just in a "probably didn't have a beta" way, and the plot is intriguing.

Comments on my own posts:

[cw: what it says on the tin, plus arguably incest] Orgasms are a memetic hazard [two comments]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[AO3; Wayback] (OP by unicornsandfibonacci) The Semi-Weekly Mandatory Gathering of Long-Suffering Fictional Policepersons and Associated Archetypes.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by sigmaleph) Thinking in third person.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by itsbenedict) Floating Point is both good and still available.

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Links:

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by thattallnerdybean; h/t sophus-b) On today's episode of the Vantablack Saga: "The Colouriest Colouring Book", by Stuart Semple.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by deadmutati0n; h/t drethelin) The thin red line between graffiti and renovation markers.

Laugh rule:
[Slate Star Codex; Wayback] (by Scott Alexander)

(I'm guessing somebody's already gone and worked out how modern Harvard tuition compares to the modern price of buying beef by the side? *checks* More or less.)

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

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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.

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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.

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†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.

(followup to this (mildly NSFW) post)

I had a bit of Amazon-US credit lying around in my personal account from the time I tried to accept a gifted copy of Too Like the Lightning and it wouldn't come through properly, and since it turned out I wasn't going to need that money for its intended purpose I figured I might as well indulge my curiosity.

The book was fairly good, I think? I definitely recommend getting a broad variety of perspectives, but one has to start somewhere and this looks like a good place to do that. (And it comes with an other-resources section, with plenty of links to places you can start branching out into that broad variety of perspectives! Some of them I hadn't heard of, so those will be interesting to investigate.)

Some scattered livebloggy thoughts:

[cw: nsfw text, arguably some tmi, (mild) amnesia]

( Read more... )

Comments on my own posts:

The one about how weirdly normal Christmas Day feels

[cw: amnesia, nsfw text] The one about Jonathan Haidt's research and hypnotic compulsions to lie

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Comments on other people's posts:

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by kallu) The lasting impact of seemingly-inconsequential moments on a child's mind.

[cw: cannibalism, fantasy racism] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by oligopsony) Ghoul worldbuilding.

[cw: illness] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by selentelechia) Dealing with the effects of airplane pressurisation issues on the ears. (also, Greyhounds) [two comments]

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Links:

[Atlantic; Wayback] (by Ed Yong) This species of spider produces milk.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (by potofsoup; h/t sophus) A Dreamwidth guide for Tumblrites. I think I might adopt the "stickied post for use as a askbox/[ping delivery station]" method, and paid accounts are more useful than I thought. (Maybe next year: it's too soon for me to be willing to drop money on this.)

( [cw: poverty] )

[Tumblr; Wayback] (by etirabys) Conjoined tortoise twins, Pete and Repete.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (by sophus) It's almost Public Domain Day!

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( footnote for the poverty bit )

Comments on my own posts:

Belated Question of the Day: December 13, 2018 [two comments]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by sophus) Dreamwidth norms, and also roguelikes. [two comments]

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by thedarlingone) Music curation. [two comments]

[cw: Christmas] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by michaelblume) In which I have a soft spot for bullshit 80's songs about poverty. (Oh, the people up there, they find it hard to relate/They don't know how it feels to be standing there on your own...)

(While I'm at it, here is the other one in the current medley. Technically from the 90's and technically about terrorism and not poverty, but I feel it is in the same genre. And it is very pretty.)

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Links:

[Atlantic; Wayback] (by Ed Yong) Peafowl have head crests that resonate with the shaking of peacocks' tails.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (by sophus) Another Christmas filk to go with the Weeping Angel one! (Much fewer monsters in this one.)

[cw: nsfw text] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by me; response by the same person who wrote the VR-porn review in the last roundup) Even those of you who were reading my Tumblr in March may not have seen the full thread. I realised last night that while I reblogged the OP, I never reblogged the response. Which meant I only had one copy of the full thread, and it was hosted on Tumblr. On *somebody else's* Tumblr. On somebody else's *sex blog* on Tumblr. Clearly, this could not stand.

Laugh rule:
[Tumblr; Wayback] (by vrakplundrare) People who bought this item were also interested in...

When I made this account, almost six years ago, it was purely for commenting and giving people a way to grant me access to their locked posts. I never thought I would post here. My only Livejournal post is a post directing people to my Tumblr.

But times change. While I don't post NSFW images...well, let me put it this way. If even Fetlife can't always be trusted to let people like me talk about sex without cracking down on them, why the hell should I trust Tumblr?

(To clarify, the Fetlife purge later ended up being temporary. But nobody--including, I think, Fetlife--knew that at the time, and I, for one, never saw them the same way after that.)

Not trusting a site is not quite the same thing as being unwilling to use it. I'll still be reblogging some stuff on Tumblr--mostly the "hey, check out this neat thing" type of reblog--but all of my OPs and quite possibly a lot of my comments will be hosted on Dreamwidth. They will be linked on Tumblr, but not cross-posted: all that you--more importantly, the censors--will be able to see on Tumblr is the link.

(And I'll be doing daily Tumblr backups to my laptop, weekly backups to my smartphone, and [not sure yet, depends on how well the Tumblr-to-Wordpress importer copes with the surge in interest] backups to Wordpress. But I was doing the first two already, and started doing the third while the purge was still mostly rumour.)

((Progress on re-formatting the Wordpress archive: ~3.8%))

I'll also be posting link roundups and roundups of places I've commented, which I am tentatively planning to combine into one type of post (with multiple sections).