Brinens and Things

Comments on my own posts:

[arguably cw: ableism] The one about the term "hyperfixation" [two comments]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: corporate bullshit] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by prokopetz) Suspiciously polished websites shilling for fellow suspiciously polished things. (Update: Dad and I (and maybe Brother) are going to give a cloud-free RoboVac to Mom as a joint gift on the first night of Hanukkah.)

[cw: food, unsanitary] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by sojournthemoon, a fictional character whose author is luminousalicorn) Obstructed melioration: not just for Amentans. [two comments, sort of]

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Links:

[mild cw: apocalypse] [The Prepared; Wayback] (by Josh Centers) Ever wanted to email people over a radio transceiver? (Since you're reading *my* blog, I'm guessing you probably have.) Turns out it's possible! Takes hundreds of dollars of equipment, a ham license, a pain-in-the-ass setup process, and an agreement not to use encryption of any kind when communicating this way, but if you're sufficiently determined it *can* be done!

(Am *I* sufficiently determined? Not at the moment. A future me with less on her plate might be, though, if a better method hasn't come along by then.)



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

( Read more... )

Comments on my own posts:

Comment and Link Roundup: May 6, 2021

They sing it back for 85,000 reasons [two comments]

[cw: poverty, government bullshit, illness, other medical stuff, (fairly mild) death] Reading a lot of personal-finance blogs lately [two comments]

The one about QuickBooks [two comments]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[arguably cw: amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by rustingbridges; partially in response to florescent--luminescence) Cloud-dependent flashcards, and their more reliable alternatives. [two comments]

[cw: apocalypse, drugs, (arguably) discourse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by rustingbridges; new comment in response to alarajrogers) Gold, disaster-hedging, and resilient tech. [five comments, one of which is new]

[cw: government bullshit] [Cashflows and Portfolios; Wayback] (OP by Joe & Mark) A gentle correction of one of the most important omissions I encountered on my wiki-walk through Canadian personal-finance blogs, TFSA edition.

[fairly mild cw: poverty, government bullshit] [Modern FImily; Wayback] (OP by Court) A gentle correction of one of the most important omissions I encountered on my wiki-walk through Canadian personal-finance blogs, drug-coverage edition.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by eightyonekilograms) Esoteric spambots.

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Links:

[National Geographic; Wayback] The world's smallest map.

[Twitter; Wayback] (by GarethWild) One man's quest to park in every parking spot at his local grocery store.

[arguably cw: aging] [AO3; Wayback] (by alessandriana; h/t silveredeye) An episode transcript of a travel show from the future.



Looks like, for the first time in a long while, I have no diseaseblogging to report today.

Today I was *trying* to determine whether a poem in an old birthday card was an Established Thing or something the sender wrote herself, and instead I stumbled across this hardcore hedonic utilitarian critiquing Brave New World and talking about what a *properly* done utopia would be like.

My first thought was "how is this dude coming across so badly? I know utilitarian arguments *can* be made well, I've seen them, so what exactly is the difference that's making him give off such creepy vibes?"

My second thought was "wow, you can really tell this dude's not autistic".

I tried pulling at that thread a little more, and I don't think it's that he's *allistic* necessarily--autism is a big umbrella--but that, specifically, he talks like someone who has *never been overstimulated*.

He thinks that if variety is good, then more of it is better; if evolution-in-the-colloquial-sense is good, then more of it is better; if pleasure is good, then more of it is better. This *absolutely does not* fit with my own experience: even *pleasure itself* can be bad if it is too intense. Not in some abstract Catholic-guilt way, but viscerally aversive.

(This does *not* seem to be a two-directional sign overflow: I am very not a masochist and have never had sufficiently intense suffering wrap around and become enjoyable. Admittedly, there are absolutely forms of pain far worse than anything I've ever experienced, but I'm hardly going to test them out: besides, masochists of my acquaintance generally indicate it doesn't need to be that intense to start working.)

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...honestly, I'm not sure I even value happiness that much? It's...nice, sure, in moderate quantities, but it hardly seems like something to base a value system around. Possibly part of it is that I'm so accustomed to operating at the second level of the Hierarchy of Needs that I can't wrap my head around the concept of wanting more than safety, but I don't think that's the whole story.

I look at that article and I think, why is *this* what he wants? He dismisses other desires as the legacy of "selfish DNA", but why latch on to *happiness* as the desire to be endorsed? What makes *that* special?

(I wonder if he would just sputter and go "It just...*is*! How could it *not* be?!". I know I tend to sputter at people who don't have a strong will to live.)

Currently in the process of forcing my sleep schedule back. For now I'm doing 45 minutes: 11:45 - 8:15 instead of 12:30 - 9.

I want to stop having to negotiate with the exam centre every time I take an exam (they normally do external exams at 9:30 AM, and I can't do a 9:30 AM exam that far away without being too sleep-deprived to exam properly). I want to take a step closer to availability for 9 - 5 internships. And I'm pretty sure that somewhere in my brain, half-buried under a lifetime of habit, is a love of mornings, and it would probably be good to embrace that even if it *weren't* practically useful.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the actual sleep part of it worked pretty much immediately but *everything else* is a struggle. There's a whole web of associations and routines that needs to be re-done. What times should I eat? Study? Exercise?

I can't just uniformly shift everything back 45 minutes, since some aspects of my schedule are dependant on other people's schedules and those haven't changed. Do I need to add an extra snacktime to account for dinner being 45 minutes later relative to most other things? Or rather, I guess I should move one of the later snacks up, since the total amount of waking time in the day is the same. Where do I move it to? And should I eat dinner 45 minutes earlier on days where everyone else is at work and there's nobody to coordinate with, or would that instability just make things worse? (It would probably just make things worse.)

I've been in a bad mood the past couple of days, and while it's mostly manifesting as to-do-list anxiety I suspect this is the root cause (or at least a major factor; the awkward period where [it's a bit too early to start studying for the exam, but if I move on to the first post-midterm chapter I'll have to take weeks off from it for the exam studying, so there's not really a point in doing any schoolwork at all right now] can't be helping). Can't wait to have a routine again, and one with room for fun.