brin_bellway | Entries tagged with disappointed resident of the future

[cw: apocalypse, corporate bullshit, (fairly mild) illness]

[not an April Fools post]

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[arguably cw: illness]

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Current Music: "Take Care" - Florence and the Machine

Man, they did *not* know in 1983 that the faint buzzing sound in the background of "That's All" was going to sound exactly like a smartphone alarm, huh.

Current Music: "That's All" - Genesis

Comments on my own posts:

[cw: illness] The one about sore throats and impending doom [two comments]

[cw: government bullshit] ""Fun"" fact of the day (March 1, 2024)

[fairly mild cw: illness] 2020s music, part 3

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: corporate bullshit] [Thoughts of Mine; Wayback] (OP by Mabel Schaefer) Fun with cell-phone-plan loopholes. [two or three comments, depending on how you count]

[cw: what it says on the tin] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

slavicafire) Food-disgust test.

[cw: food (with picture)] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

lnthefade) This is a thing that is now, unfortunately, not being offered at Disney World.

[fairly mild cw: discourse] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by

mindstalk) A modest proposal for affordable food/housing.

[cw: illness] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by

siderea) Changing mask tech for a changing world.

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Links:

[cw: death, (arguably) discourse] [New York Times - Wayback] (by Helen Ouyang; h/t swimmer) The race to reinvent CPR.

[Crystalverse; Wayback] (by Chase) How to grow pyramid salt crystals.

[fairly mild cw: illness]

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[fairly strong cw: what it says on the tin, aging]

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Comments on my own posts:

[cw: food, (arguably) illness, (arguably) heights] I have officially survived my twenties

[cw: illness] Variolation, part 4: Secondhand [three comments, one of which is new]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

itsbenedict) A day in the life of a Tumblr user.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

oak23) The importance of ego-syntonic clothing.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by

nenya_kanadka) How to make Wikia actually usable (and Dreamwidth even more usable).

[cw: illness, medical, (fairly mild) venting] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

cordeliaflyte) Fantasies about easy solutions to medical problems: not always pleasant.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

eightyonekilograms, though also kind of

jv) Tumblr Backup Awareness Week, and a modernised version of tumblr-utils. (Though I ran into enough problems getting the python3 version of tumblr-utils working that I eventually gave up and went back to python2.)

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by

thedarlingone) More on the mobile-accessibility updates to Dreamwidth.

[cw: nsfw text] [Dreamwidth; Wayback crawling forbidden] (OP by

porthole) The distinction between fetishes that can be done in real life and those that cannot (and the grey areas between).

[arguably cw: apocalypse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

ladiesloveduranduran) Which of these U.S. cities would you be most willing to live in?

[cw: illness, (arguably) poison] [Updated part of WordPress thread (Tumblr)] (OP by

rustingbridges; partly in respose to

keynes-fetlife-mutual) Nipping colds in the bud (maybe) with zinc lozenges. [three comments, two of which are new]

[cw: illness, vomit, unsanitary] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

toasthaste; in response to

robustcornhusk) Norovirus prevention tips.

[cw: sexism, embarrassment squick] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

RaxKingIsDead) Accidental street harassment.

[cw: corporate bullshit, (arguably) government bullshit] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

JoshGreenberg27) How to get government-funded U.S. tax preparation. (It's still not 100% clear, but it looks like probably *not* for non-residents. On the ""bright"" side, I'm below the income threshold to have to file at all for 2023, and there's no further stimulus checks to claim by doing it anyway.)

[Start of WordPress thread (Tumblr part 1; Tumblr part 2)] (OP by

gummybugg; mostly in response to

sacrificedtoatree) I have unlocked a fiction-writing skill tree! [two comments]

[arguably cw: guns] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

trailertrashin) "The Glass Eye - Adult Greeting Cards": a real store that really exists, somehow.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

whatcha-thinkin) Assuming you had access to perfect medical care at no additional cost, which of these fixes would you want most?

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Links:

[strong cw: illness] [Patreon; Wayback] (by Violet Blue; h/t

siderea) A list of COVID-19 resources, consisting largely of people doing their best to navigate things on their own because God knows there are no trustworthy authorities left on this. I bought a $4 bottle of store-brand mouthwash (contains cetylpyridinium chloride) because of this post: I figure it's an extremely low-risk bet.

On a similar though shorter/narrower note, https://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/805203.html

(Update from January: ...if someone who *doesn't* now have a history of COVID infection (or who can otherwise psychologically handle it) can pick through all the stuff in Violet's news roundups about Post-Acute Sequelae Even Worse Than Previously Believed to get at the actionable advice, I would appreciate it)

[cw: illness] [Absolutely Maybe; Wayback] (by Hilda Bastian) Researchers have not given up on creating a COVID vaccine with sterilising and/or durable immunity! Things may still improve.

[cw: corporate bullshit] [PCMag; Wayback] (by Chloe Albanesius; h/t Violet Blue) Obituaries for tech products and services that were shut down in 2023.

[Youtube; Invidious] (by Pope Kallisti; h/t

blazingdarkness) A MIDI conversion of "Bring Me to Life".

[Live Science; Wayback] (by Victoria Atkinson) I told somebody in a nuclear-vs-solar argument a while back that I'd care less about solar if ordinary citizens could get household-scale nuclear batteries. There has been non-zero progress towards this.

Two laugh-rule entries:
[Beware The Shadows; Wayback] (by Brett J. Talley) The 56 best/worst analogies written by high school students (or, fairly likely, ""high school students""). (I've seen a lot of these before, but not all of them.)

My favourite is "Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph."

[brr; Wayback] (by Anonymous; h/t Jenn) Showering at the South Pole. (This whole blog is amazing, though usually more in a "wow, Antarctica is such a place" way than a "funny" way.)

Current Music: "Bring Me to Life" - Evanescence

[Public Mobile; Wayback]

Somewhere in the third to ninth paragraph, depending on how you count:

$40/month for 30 GB data at 5G speed and unlimited data at reduced speed (emphasis added)

Talk about burying the lede.

(Oh, you can get 20 GB for $34 from them, and unlimited data for $25/month from Chatr (apparently they've even stopped charging for outgoing calls since last I checked), and overall I'm sticking with the 250 MB for $15 (minus various discounts: I'm currently paying $12.43 after tax personally, plus Dad gets $1 off for having me as an active referral), but still, it's a good sign.)

Comments on my own posts:

[cw: (fairly strong) illness, venting, death] The one about Mom coming down with a fever

[cw: illness, medical, food] Status update, morning of 2023-08-01 [three comments]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

lakevida) The many meanings of a novelty hat.

[cw: nsfw text, (arguably) drugs, (arguably) apocalypse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

oligetcetera) Superstimuli and the oncoming future.

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Links:

[cw: (strong) illness, fire, apocalypse] There's a lot of chaff in plaguepoems@mastodon.social (...not that I can blame them, trying to write a poem on the same subject every weekday for years on end), but here's a selection of my favourites from the past couple months:

https://mastodon.social/@plaguepoems/110822170645699645:

In block letters at the top
of the hand sanitizer station
were the words
“protect yourself”
but the dispenser itself
was broken and empty
which I really must say
felt like some kind of metaphor.

https://mastodon.social/@plaguepoems/110623194611543597:

I saw a warning
from the department of health
urging residents “to take
appropriate precautions
as smoke
from Canadian wildfires”
is once more making the air
unhealthy to breathe
so if someone asks me
which airborne threat
my mask is for
I will simply say “all of them.”

https://mastodon.social/@plaguepoems/110571904159328242:

She tells me
that at this point
it would take a miracle
not to catch it again
and it’s not that I disagree
but that I believe
there are points in time
when if you are hoping
for a miracle
you have to make it yourself.

https://mastodon.social/@plaguepoems/110573627092710431:

I know a historian
who says
during the pandemic
and means by that
the past.

I know a doctor
who says
during the pandemic
and means by that
the present.

And
I know an epidemiologist
who says
during the pandemic
and means by that
the future.

[cw: illness] [CDC; Wayback] "Locally Acquired Malaria Cases Identified in the United States".

[cw: food] [NPR; Wayback] (by Allison Aubrey) Meanwhile, in good news, cell-cultured chicken has been approved for sale in America! It's at a fancy restaurant in San Francisco and costs if-you-have-to-ask-you-don't-want-to-know, but computers were once prohibitively expensive too.

[Sourcehut; Wayback] (by Ploum) Offpunk: an offline-first web browser.

Laugh-rule entries:
[Substack; Wayback] (by Moly)

[cw: drugs]

Yunnan: MUSHROOMS, people going to the ER because of MUSHROOMS, people getting out of the ER to continue eating MUSHROOMS, HALLUCINOGENIC MUSHROOMS. It’s the Colorado of China, if instead of marijuana, you had MUSHROOMS.

[Mastodon; Wayback] (by compositor@wayland.social)

Welcome to Wayland.social: the successor to X.com.

(I speak *just enough* Linux jargon to understand that this is funny.)

Comments on my own posts:

Tips on Offline-First Smartphones, 2023 Edition [one comment on Dreamwidth, one comment on Tumblr]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

nuclearspaceheater) General life improvements of weightlifting.

[cw: illness, (fairly mild) venting] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by

mindstalk) The spirit (and not just the letter) of mask rules.

[arguably cw: amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

unprettyextra; in response to

etirabys) How to help archive Imgur. (Though Imgur has since started its deletions, the archiving project continues.)

[cw: embarrassment squick, (arguably) discourse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

hjartasalt; in response to

nuclearspaceheater) American hegemony and (sort-of)-multi-currency cash registers.

[cw: amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

sigmaleph) How to (maybe) know your sleep latency.

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Links:

[arguably cw: amnesia] [Baturin; Wayback] (by Daniil Baturin) A review of a Windows-ripoff Linux distro from 2003.

Laugh-rule entries:
[WordPress; Wayback] (by Bret Devereaux)

This is the third part of the second part of our three(ish) part look at the governing structures of the Greek polis (I, IIa, IIb). At some point I promise I will write a series whose organization does not look like a parody of itself.

[Mastodon; Wayback] (h/t Seebs)

(here's the alt text on that image in case you want to stick it into Google Traduction:

ARRÊTEZ L'ANGLAIS – L'ANGLAIS N'EST PAS CENSÉE ÊTRE UNE LANGUE INTERNATIONALE – DES ANNÉES D’ANGLAIS et pourtant AUCUN INTERÊT parce qu’on peut regarder la version du film doublée par Kev Adams – Tu veux dire des trucs en anglais pour rigoler? On a un outil pour Ça, Ça s'appelle «GOOGLE TRADUCTION» – «Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Will, will Will will Will Will's will? All the faith he had had had had no effect on the outcome of his life» – Indistinguable d'un AVC REGARDE ce que les Anglais te demande de Respecter, avec tous les cours & voyages linguistiques qu’on fait pour les comprendre (Ce sont de VRAIS mots anglais, parlé par de VRAIS Anglais): Embezzling ????? gobbledygook ??????? discombobulated ????????????????? «The bamboozled children skedaddled»
Ils se sont foutus de notre gueule putaingue

[WordPress; Wayback] (by Crow)

In promoting her new book, the author also made a few choice memes. I can’t think of any other way to describe them.

They immediately without context are my kind of humour. Clickhole could post this and I’d send it to all my friends. Levelling is, as a reminder, a sometimes used term to describe killing god. These stock photos are very persuasive in getting me to love god, I’ll admit. I’ll say the unlevel memes are also quite tumblr ‘I dreamed of this meme and now it is real’ style.

[Know Your Meme; Wayback]

A Google Trends graph for 'stonks'. Hovertext shows that the date of a sudden peak is January 24 - 30, 2021.

A Google Trends graph for 'stonks'. Hovertext shows that the date of another, smaller peak is July 10 - 16, 2022.

[cw: illness] [Armbrust; Wayback] Review of a terrible surgical mask.

"And look at the stare in his eyes. I mean, the woman is intense, but this dude, like something's going on there, man. It's the face of someone actually receiving the coronavirus into their body."

[AO3; Wayback] (by

seasparks) I don't go here, I was just wiki-walking, but:

seasons of crappy Netflix that were deemed sufficiently bad to allow Canadian access to them

(This post is a supplement to this Tumblr comment, but also stands alone.)

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I wrote an extremely outdated guide in 2015, and a substantially outdated guide in 2018, so it would seem I’m due for another one.

I did not have a data plan (or, indeed, any cell plan) for over six years after getting my first smartphone. Currently I have a 250 MB/month plan, and I never max it out.

I also like to keep the amount of corp on my phone to a minimum where practical, so some of these may not be the most optimal app if prioritising *purely* offline-ness. Those two things often go together, though.
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(There's quite a bit to catch up on here, so I've added extra line breaks between entries to make it less of a jumble of text.)

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Comments on my own posts:

[fairly mild cw: embarrassment squick] I didn't *make* any comments on my own posts this round (apart from postscripts/tangents written alongside the OPs), but I note that I did receive two comments on "I continue to live in an alternate universe" through Tumblr.

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: what it says on the tin] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

flaxseedthot; partly in response to

rustingbridges) Disney World during 9/11.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

rustingbridges) Second-generation hyphenated surnames.

[arguably cw: medical, unsanitary, apocalypse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

akaanonymouth; partly in response to

sigmaleph) Household logistics, safety nets, and the importance of spare toothbrushes. [two comments]

[arguably cw: food] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

seaglass_takechan) Reporting a violation of the food/pretty-rock binary.

[cw: nsfw text, apocalypse, (arguably) drugs] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

femmenietzsche) In which Brin has second thoughts about whether "I could see myself using [AI-powered writing commissions] for pornography, but even then only because I have very narrow tastes" would be a good idea in practice.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

sigmaleph) Email usage patterns and organisation.

[arguably cw: poverty] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

rustingbridges) High-quality socks (and how sometimes the cardboard-sole boots are the better deal).

[cw: illness, apocalypse, (arguably) amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

eightyonekilograms; partly in response to

sigmaleph) In the future, "zoonosis" will be a word everyone knows; knowing *where* they learned it is another matter. [~three comments, one of which is new]

[cw: food, illness, poverty, (arguably) animal abuse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

augustheart) If lab grown meat became widely available and easily affordable, would you eat it? (At least two people were too quick on the ball and read the draft version of this that I posted slightly too soon, so if you read the non-postscripted version of this do note that there *is* more.)

[cw: unsanitary, (arguably) violence] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

tanadrin) The relative merits of fear, shame, and anger.

[cw: aging, injury, poison, death, (arguably) illness] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

sigmaleph) Independent wealth vs a chance to remake your body.

[cw: illness] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

thearchivebaby) Decorated respirators and the Glorious Transhumanist Future.

[cw: corporate bullshit, nsfw text, (arguably) illness, (arguably) apocalypse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

soolagna-meow) Mourning broken tools, and searching for aligned replacements.

[fairly mild cw: death, injury] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

ultirex) How would you do if dropped at a point on Earth outputted by a random coordinates generator?

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Links:

[fairly strong cw: illness] [Mastodon (Twitter); Wayback] (by librarianshipwreck) I know it takes time to get over things.

[cw: corporate bullshit, apocalypse] [WordPress; Wayback] (by librarianshipwreck) What Y2K can teach us about Twitter. Particularly notable quote:
And in the wake of Y2K proving to be something of a non-event—thanks to the efforts of the legions of people who got to work fixing the problem—the sort of introspection that Y2K called for did not occur. Instead, people and societies only deepened their reliance on computer technologies and by extension the executives and companies that controlled those systems.

[The Intercept; Wayback] (by Nikita Mazurov; h/t Bruce Schneier) Some image-manipulation programs--including, but not limited to, the one in Google Docs--leave the original image data inside the file of a cropped image, allowing the recipient to uncrop it and reveal bits that you specifically did not want them to see.

Three laugh-rule entries:
[cw: (strong) rape, (strong) nsfw text, amnesia] [Read Only Mind; Wayback] (by scifiscribbler) I did not *like* this work, and I shudder to think how low the author's standards must be to think that *this* constitutes "wholesome", but that opening line is amazing:
The television was the colour of a television tuned to a dead channel.

[arguably cw: theft] [Vice; Wayback] (by Joseph Cox) You know how with sci-fi shows we're always yelling at the screen about "why are you people still using voiceprint authentication as if it means anything when you also have good voice synthesis"? Yeah.
To create the voice, I recorded about five minutes of speech and uploaded it to ElevenLabs (for the audio clips, I read sections of Europe’s data protection law).

[cw: what it says on the tin, nsfw image] [Substack; Wayback] (by Sam Kriss)
they’d got the impression that I was one of those people who really has his finger on the pulse. I told them that I definitely wasn’t, I just made things up with enough confidence that people believed me, just like I’ve made up exactly 45% of everything I’m writing here

Also the rambling manifesto containing "谷歌翻译应用程序". (It's funnier if you *can't* read Chinese, though I expect it's still funny if you can.)

[cw: corporate bullshit, (arguably) illness]

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Comments on my own posts:

[N/A]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

tototavros) Recommendations for podcasts (and, more importantly, transcripts) about American history. (Update: AFAICT only the *later* episodes of Presidencies of the United States have transcripts. The earliest episode transcript I could find was "3.28 - The Calming Seas". Still, in medias res is something.) [one or two comments, depending on how you count]

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

moral-autism; partly in response to

analytically) Why use Spotify as a music player when you can use Youtube? (Not to even mention Quod Libet or Odyssey.)

[cw: illness] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by

mindstalk) Favourite masks.

[cw: medical, poverty] [Start of WordPress thread (Tumblr part 1; Tumblr part 2)] (OP by

rustingbridges) The financial intricacies of dental insurance.

[Blogspot; Wayback] (OP by Michael James) A gentle correction of one of the most important omissions I encountered on my wiki-walk through Canadian personal-finance blogs, RRSP reporting edition.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by

mindstalk) Hypophantasia and dream accuracy.

[mild cw: food] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

TrinCyboid) From the people who brought you mystery melons, we also have 24 liveblogging. (Both are hilarious.) [one or two comments, depending on how you count]

[cw: food] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by

mindstalk) Egg-boiling techniques.

[cw: food, (arguably) poverty] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by

mindstalk) More on egg-boiling techniques, now with energy conservation.

[cw: poverty] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

moonlit-tulip) Holidays and the value of routine-breaking (or, perhaps, routine-keeping on a higher level).

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by

lunartulip) The wonders of "details" HTML tags.

[cw: poison, poverty] [Start of WordPress thread (Tumblr part 1; Tumblr part 2)] (OP by

moral-autism; partly in response to

humanfist) The importance of avoiding home radon exposure.

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Links:

[cw: corporate bullshit] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (by

ponett) BreezeWiki: an adversarially interoperable Wikia frontend that is (unlike the official one) *actually usable*.

[strong cw: illness] [BBC; Wayback] (by Zaria Gorvett; h/t cvirtue) Measles: much worse than previously believed.

[Explain Shell] (by Idan Kamara; h/t Ilzolende) Command-line-to-English machine translation.

[Internet Archive] How to archive your tweets with the Wayback Machine. (The ingest-URLs-from-spreadsheet bit is intriguing regardless.)

Comments on my own posts:

The one about Recoll

[cw: what it says on the tin] The one about plague nightmares [one comment, not counting the postscript]

[fairly mild cw: war, amnesia] The one about remembrance poppies

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Comments on other people's posts:

[Substack; Wayback] (OP by Evan Þ) If you enjoy my posts in which I express wildly alien intuitions about things, you may enjoy me dipping my toes into a (very polite) discussion of free will. (At least, I assume these intuitions are wildly alien from how often I see people say things that only make sense under different intuition sets. In any case, we are pleased to offer the finest autoxenoanthropology here at Brinens and Things.) [two comments]

[cw: poverty, venting] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

catchymemes) In which I have a lot of psychological baggage around museums.

[cw: death, aging, apocalypse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

treadwells) Cottagecore and a broader view of danger.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by

mindstalk) The hole in comparative social-media discussions left by ignorance of Tumblr.

[cw: food, poison, illness, (arguably) death] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

ultraviolet-divergence) Dealing with the latest big listeria outbreak.

[cw: (strong) illness, (strong) apocalypse, bugs] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by

siderea; in response to

ewt) The wonders of PPE, climate-catastrophe edition.

[fairly mild cw: corporate bullshit] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

rustingbridges; in response to

bulbous-oar) How to selectively prevent Android apps from accessing the Internet.

[Scribble Hub; Wayback] (OP by wingedcatgirl) Isekais and the importance of caution when carrying irreplaceable otherworldly technology.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

headspace-hotel) Poetic meter and artistic instincts.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

reptile-ruler) Fighting Tumblr's slippage down the slope towards Internet silos.

[cw: illness, apocalypse, (arguably) amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

eightyonekilograms; partly in response to

sigmaleph) In the future, "zoonosis" will be a word everyone knows; knowing *where* they learned it is another matter. [two comments, sort of]

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Links:

[Imgur; Wayback] Live wire-sculpture (not to be confused with live-wire sculpture).

[arguably cw: injury, embarrassment squick] [Hackaday; Wayback] (by Lewin Day) False positives on Apple's automatic car-crash 911 calling.

[CBS; Wayback] (by Phil Galewitz) Over-the-counter hearing aids now available in the United States.

(Although I am also having feelings about this sentence:

A pair of prescription devices typically sells for {{USD}}$2,000 to $8,000.

Only if you're getting ripped off, dude. Go to Costco. *So* glad we told the non-chain hearing-aid centre to go fuck themselves when they wanted six grand: the perfectly fine Costco hearing aids were CAD$1,800 *before* the $1,000 government subsidy. (that's not even *counting* the refundable tax credits I might be able to wring out of it))

[Kiwix; Wayback] What is the size of Wikipedia? (Also, your regular reminder that Kiwix is amazing and you should check it out. (And it gets even *better* than amazing after you figure out how to make your own ZIM files.))

[AO3; Wayback] (by

Edonohana; h/t Ozy Brennan) The intricacies of tardigrade literature.

[cw: what it says on the tin] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (by

siderea) Stop relying on Twitter for third-party authentication.

[cw: what it says on the tin] [Science; Wayback] (by Arevalo et al; h/t

KelseyTUOC) A 20-valent influenza vaccine, containing examples of every known flu subtype. Works well in mice and ferrets, soon to be tested in primates and--hopefully--humans. In addition to the obvious benefits, it shows promise of providing cross-protection against novel influenza strains.

Three laugh-rule entries:
[cw: corporate bullshit] [Twitter; Wayback] (by

rahaeli) Sporking the Cohost terms of service.

[Youtube; Wayback] (by Lauren Lopez and Robert Manion; h/t Blazing Darkness) Bella Swan is sixteen, going on seventeen...

[cw: scopophobia, (arguably) corporate bullshit] [Reddit; Wayback] (h/t

trivialagent) It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you.

Comments on my own posts:

Today's the day! It's happening! [one comment, *including* the postscript because the postscript was written late enough to be easily missed]

[cw: (strong) fire, unreality, (mild) illness] Happy...new...year? [one comment, not counting the postscript]

Today's the day, part ~2: House Community Grid

[cw: bugs, (fairly mild) death, (mild) unsanitary)] The one about fly math [one comment on Tumblr]

English is a bullshit language (like all the others)

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: food, (fairly mild) apocalypse, (arguably) poison] [Substack; Wayback] (OP by Nicholas Weininger) Induction stoves vs gas stoves vs electric-coil stoves. [two comments]

[cw: (strong) food, (arguably) nsfw text] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

andaisq; h/t

moral-autism) Sociological specfic about a world where people view food with the same sense of profundity and privacy with which we view sex.

[cw: illness, needles (picture in Tumblr version, but not in WordPress version)] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

syellowtails) ~~The latest~~ additional info on COVID-19 bivalent vaccine timing, mostly but not exclusively regarding the United States. (The most recent thing I've since heard is that, while the Ontarian government continues to *recommend* six-month intervals for most triage groups, it's possible to get a vaccine dose only three months after your previous one with a bit of additional hoop-jumping.)

[cw: poverty, illness, (arguably) venting] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by Lucy Liu) Updates from future-me on how my situation has changed since 2018. [three comments, one of which is new]

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

snakestack) The seat of a computer's soul.

[cw: venting, (mild) poison, (arguably) illness, (arguably) scrupulosity] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

albertvancouver) Unrelatable complaints about city design.

[cw: discourse, unsanitary, aging, medical] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

boeing747) *Extremely* unrelatable complaints about the "oversanitization of popular media".

[cw: food, embarrassment squick, amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

robustcornhusk) Way(s) to make Jewish apple cake, and how they've evolved over time.

[cw: nsfw text]
( Read more... )

[cw: nsfw text] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

cryptotheism; in response to

sigmaleph) I was planning to wait for this roundup post to talk about the above, but I was having too many emotions and they leaked out into a post. Sorry for leaking my emotions onto your post, Sofi. [two comments]

[cw: illness, (arguably) discourse, (arguably) amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

discoursedrome) The past, present, and future of public mask cosplay.

[cw: food, (arguably) discourse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

rustingbridges) Excuses for holidays. [two comments]

---

Links:

[cw: food, (arguably) trypophobia]
( Read more... )

[Imgur] (h/t Sonata) A book with a built-in lectern.

[cw: (fairly mild) trypophobia, (arguably) body horror] [Twitter; Wayback] (by

jonty; h/t Xom) Bugfix for multiocular O.

Three laugh-rule entries:
[Twitter; Wayback] (by

Foone; h/t

ericvilas) Can gender run Doom? For that matter, can visual static run Doom? (I won't spoil the final punchline, but do read to the end. I think I've even coaxed the Internet Archive into making their version readable start-to-finish.)

[Youtube; Wayback] (by Lou & Peter Berryman) A car drove by blaring "Sweet Home Alabama", and it got me thinking about this song again (it's not "Sweet Home Alabama").

[cw: corporate bullshit] [Mobile Syrup; Wayback] (by Jonathan Lamont)

Locking the doors, on the other hand, will probably just frustrate customers (and if they’re going into a Rogers store, chances are they’re already pissed off).

[arguably cw: embarrassment squick]

( Read more... )

(part 1)

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Computers that I physically possess, for which I do not need permission before executing software on them, and on which nobody outside my household stakes a claim:

* My laptop
* Our TV's prosthetic brain (a thirteen-year-old ThinkPad running Linux Lite, with its A/V wired into the TV)
* My smartphone
* Possibly the other two remaining smartphones from my failed experiments with LineageOS, though they may no longer be usable enough: last I checked one of them had a broken USB port and could only be charged by swapping out its battery (which seems unsuitable for extended crunching projects), and I *think* the other one has started bootlooping though I'm not sure if it managed to pull out of that. (...oh hey, it *did* pull out of that. Interesting. I might be able to wring some more compute out of it if I strangle its fucking bloatware first. If it is to be one of my computers (particularly one crunching sensitive data), it will be *mine*, and AT&T gets no say in it whatsoever.)

((even if AT&T doesn't give a shit, it's the principle of the thing))

2022-09-25, 10:50 AM:
Successfully installed Whisper on the TV brain and got it to start crunching 2020-01-22, the first day. It's started outputting and everything! Looks like past-me is discussing electricity prices with her family.

I admit I did not especially understand the instructions I looked up on how to fix the "/home/netflix/.local/bin is not in PATH" errors, but I did successfully infer how to *circumvent* the problem of it not being in PATH:

/home/netflix/.local/bin/./whisper *.mp3 --model small.en --output_dir 2020-01-22-v1

(I realised pretty quickly that I should be labelling the transcript folders "v1", so that when I'm later upgrading them to higher-quality transcripts I'll know which days have been upgraded by how much.)

2022-09-25, 10:30 PM:
Me, last night: I'm pleased that it seems to already have a decent corpus of th-fronters

Whisper: We used to have 12 baddies, now we have a free.

("We used to have twelve bags, now we have three.")

Well, so be it. (And hey, I run into this problem with *people* sometimes too.)

2022-09-25, 10:45 PM:
Checked on the TV brain. Whisper does *run* on a thirteen-year-old laptop, and I appreciate that you're not *completely* locked out of using Whisper if that's all you have, but also it's been crunching for twelve hours and it's made it through about eight minutes. At this rate it's going to take...about four days to get through 2020-01-22, and that day was among the shorter ones.

The smartphones are loosely equal in specs to the TV brain, so I doubt they'd fare much better even if I can figure out an appropriate Termux setup. Definitely doesn't sound feasible to do on my real phone (even considering that I don't touch my phone many if not most days, there would be interruptions multiple times a week). Not sure it's worth trying to get it running on the other one.

...ooh, apparently (for compatibility reasons, I think) Whisper defaults to CPU and you have to explicitly tell it to use a GPU. I'll have to check what happens if I try that on my laptop, though I'll wait for one of the current two to complete rather than trying to throw in a third one. (I have *some* sort of dedicated graphics system, though it wasn't a priority of mine at the time so I don't have a clear sense of what (and, again, six-year-old business laptop, so whatever-it-is probably isn't that good: might be helpful vs CPU-only, though).)

2022-09-26, 8:04 PM:
I didn't leave my laptop running overnight, for...reasons best discussed in a separate post, but (unsurprisingly) the Whispers were undamaged by overnight suspension and one of the initial two has since finished.

I *think*, if I'm making the correct inferences from these error messages and help documents, that my GPU is incompatible because it's *both* old *and* AMD. New AMD (specifically, AMD with ROCm support) is slightly tricky but salvageable; old Nvidia might be salvageable; old AMD doesn't seem to have any salvage options.

Also, Mom says the TV brain is incapable of running Whisper and Netflix at the same time, which means an infeasible number of interruptions on *that* device too. And the AT&T smartphone seems to be locked down hard enough that I can't turn on USB debugging and strangle the bloatware. *God* I hate this phone.

I'll see if I can accumulate any castoff devices for Project House Community Grid, but at this rate I think I'm going to be starved for compute for the next...hmm...127 GB of data...28.8 MB/hour...implies an average of 4.5 hours of new data per day and about 4,400 hours to catch up on...three hours real-time to process one hour of data on my laptop if running two Whispers in parallel...three and a half years.

Well, with a figure like that I'll probably need a new laptop before then anyway. I will definitely be on the lookout for GPU specs next time I'm on the hunt for a primary computer.

In the meantime, I think I'll probably compromise by *not* attempting to catch up on the backlog, and just transcribe going forward for the time being. My poor computer deserves a chance to rest sometimes.

(...did Brother upgrade his gaming desktop's GPU a few months ago? He did some sort of desktop hardware upgrade; I think it might have been that. I wonder if he still has the old one, and what it would take to cobble it into a minimum viable desktop...)

---

(edit: part 3)

Comments on my own posts:

[cw: discourse, (arguably) apocalypse] The one about AI artists [one comment, not counting the postscript]

---

Comments on other people's posts:

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by

mindstalk) Old kitchen appliances (and when to replace them); the wonders of mosquito nets. [two comments]

[fairly mild cw: food] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by

mindstalk) Optimal potato baking.

[arguably cw: discourse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by Anonymous; partly in response to

jadagul) The unrelatability of complaints about modernity (or at least these sub-genres of complaints).

(Update: writing that post inspired me to give warc2zim another try, and this time I successfully got it working! (The Linux port of Kiwix can't *directly* display warc2zim files, but it turns out there's a workaround: activate local-server mode and view the file through your web browser.) Mobile access, baby! (*And* it's even slightly more space-efficient!))

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

transgenderer) How to send and receive SMS messages from your laptop.

[fairly mild cw: illness] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by

camwyn) Dutch has some amazing profanity.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by

camwyn) The wonders of mosquito nets, disability edition.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

doctorwhoisadhd; in response to

itsbenedict) How to play Character Opinion Bingo.

[arguably cw: unreality] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by

seat-safety-switch) Solar phone charging, the easy ways.

---

Links:

[My Modern Met; Wayback] (by Larisa Crowder) The technology behind heated car seats, now wearable and reversible (that is to say, it can also do cooling). (Kind of expensive and hard to get, but I suppose new devices usually are.)

[cw: illness] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (by the United States Department of Homeland Security, Science and Technology Directorate; h/t

siderea) How to disinfect monkeypox fomites, and how not to.

[arguably cw: venting] [The Millions; Wayback] (by Rebecca Steinitz) A personal view of anosmia. (I came across this link buried in an old email, where I was recommending it to others. It's interesting to look back at it now, having developed a very different relationship with anosmia.)

[Mobile Syrup; Wayback] (by Jonathan Lamont) Payment-method optimisation is about to become *even more* complicated. My parents can't keep up as it is.

[Imgur; Wayback] (h/t Marri) Ordinary office worker in the streets...

Laugh rule:
[cw: illness] [Jenneral HQ; Wayback] (by Jenn)
Relatedly, as a #millennial, the whole #supportlocal lifestyle where I go to 4 specialty grocers for specific ingredients instead of one (1) Loblaw is very appealing to me.

(...I admit that this line is significantly less funny after I looked it up and discovered that the singular of Loblaws *is* sometimes "Loblaw", and not *always* also "Loblaws".)

[cw: discourse, (arguably) apocalypse]

( Read more... )

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Brinens and Things

now with 50% more Internet Archive

Entries tagged with disappointed resident of the future

Things I read this fortnight

2020s music, part 4

Not a tornado warning, not a kidnapping notice, not even a signal that cookies are done baking

Comment and Link Roundup: June 14, 2024

2020s music, part 3

thinking about brain-damage insurance lately

Comment and Link Roundup: February 23, 2024

(no subject)

Comment and Link Roundup: August 4, 2023

Comment and Link Roundup: June 1, 2023

Tips on Offline-First Smartphones, 2023 Edition

Comment and Link Roundup: March 16, 2023

No one can fill those of your needs that you won't let show

Comment and Link Roundup: February 1, 2023

Comment and Link Roundup: December 2, 2022

Comment and Link Roundup: October 17, 2022

Today's the day, part ~3

Today's the day, part ~2: House Community Grid

Comment and Link Roundup: August 31, 2022