Brinens and Things

*flump*

[muffled by lying facedown] hello and welcome to the Q4 edition of this fortnightly roundup

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Comments on my own posts:

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


[arguably cw: apocalypse] Friday Five: August 25, 2023


[cw: food, poverty] Extreme couponing [two comments on Tumblr]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: apocalypse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by c-rowlesdraws) The fictional for now cultural symbolism of auroras.


[cw: illness, apocalypse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by stumpyjoepete; partly in response to nuclearspaceheater) Air-purifier recs.


[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by lonelyroommp3) The psychological importance of tidy surfaces.


[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by sigmaleph) What does "soul" even mean, anyway?


[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by moonlit-tulip) VPNs and Tumblr shadowbanning. (Update: they *eventually* un-shadowbanned me, several weeks after I contacted them.) [two comments]


[arguably cw: amnesia] [Start of WordPress thread (Tumblr part 1; Tumblr part 2; Tumblr part 3; Tumblr part 4)] (OP by calware; also in response to lizardywizard) Pi and the overestimation of common knowledge; speaking of senseless, fortunately-lifted Tumblr bans... [two comments, sort of]


[cw: illness] [Start of WordPress thread (Tumblr part 1; Tumblr part 2)] (OP by rustingbridges) Nipping colds in the bud (maybe) with zinc lozenges. (They *do* sell Life Extension in Canada, it turns out.)

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Links:

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by sun-dari, but read the whole thread) Pun translations in Good Omens.


[Substack; Wayback] (by Adrian Hon; h/t wolffyluna) Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser: a LARP event from a post-scarcity (or at least much richer) society that tried to manifest on a world not prosperous enough to support it. (Or at least, that was *my* takeaway from the article.)


[Taiwan Quest; Wayback] (by Zhen-Kang) Discouraging under-the-table transactions via a government receipt lottery.


[strong cw: illness] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (by synecdochic) Modern COVID-testing technique. (Well, the post is mostly about other COVID-related things, but anyway.)


[cw: medical, (arguably) illness] [Ontario; America; Wayback 1; Wayback 2] (h/t cobaltdrgn) Did you know that fat people need a different size of vaccine needle?


[NASA; Wayback] We, the people of Earth, have obtained actual rocks from an actual asteroid!


[Dynomight; Wayback] (by Dynomight) The midwit home: smart enough to be helpful, not smart enough to betray you to the corporate overlords (or just be an overcomplicated pain in the ass).


[strong cw: poison, death] [Los Angeles Times; Wayback] (by Emily Alpert Reyes and Cindy Carcamo; h/t nuclearspaceheater) The terrible hidden cost of engineered-stone countertops.


Laugh rule:
[cw: (fairly strong) illness, (fairly strong) apocalypse, war] [Mastodon; Wayback] (by plaguepoems@mastodon.social)

Darker days ahead
she tells me
for all of us there are
darker days ahead
and as she delivers
this ominous declaration
I’m not really sure
if she means the plague
or the catastrophe
some other calamity
or daylight savings
but regardless of the specifics
I fear she is right.

Comments on my own posts:

Ask me about my special interests [six comments, two of which are new]

Blog formatting skills [three comments, two of which are new]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by rustingbridges) How to keep Firefox browsing history indefinitely.

[WordPress; Wayback] (OP by theredsheep) WordPress posts are harder to take back than you might think.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by baption0 of Reddit) How many "chuggas" are you supposed to say before "choo choo"?

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by contrarianarchon) Automated receipt transcription.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by rustingbridges) Problems with reCAPTCHA. [four comments, two of which are new]

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Links:

[CNET; Wayback] (by Jackson Ryan; h/t ilzo-misc) Living radiation-shielding.

[cw: violence, arson, death] [Bloomberg; Wayback] (by Jeff Maysh; h/t Matt Levine) The story of a Pepsi bottle-cap contest gone horribly wrong.



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

( Read more... )

Edit: [epistemic status: trying to get a clearer sense of the many complicated feelings I have about this subject]

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Epcot and to some extent Tomorrowland like to portray themselves as portraying the Glorious Future, and to some extent they do. But the most Glorious Future aspect of them (as of 2015) isn't the rocketships or electronic background music. You know what it is?

It's the Wi-Fi.

The whole place is blanketed in it. No extra charge, no time or data limits, no account signup, not so much as an entry portal. You can pull out your smartphone and try to do an Internet-requiring thing and it just *works*.

And this did enhance my Disney-ing! I could look up the lyrics to a Disney song I'd heard in passing earlier, or request a different reservation time at a ride or restaurant. I did some Disney-related Internet use at the parks pretty much every day I was at a park at all, and it was a lot better than having to wonder how the words of a song went or having to hunt down a FastPass kiosk.

But I could also just check my email or read something or whatever, and I could know that all of these *options* were there even when I wasn't using them. It was *beautiful*.

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There *has* been some continued proliferation of Wi-Fi hotspots over the past few years--I think more so in America than Canada--but we do also seem to be moving in the direction of relying more on mobile data, on each individual arranging for (and paying for) their own [Internet access while away from home]. I'm still annoyed by the sign I saw at an alcohol store a couple years ago recommending you read their website for more information on a thing, *but the store didn't have Wi-Fi, they just assumed you had brought your own data*.

And part of me knows that I'm being a bit unreasonable and double-standard-y, that access to the cellular infrastructure isn't *all* that expensive even in Canada (well known for its bullshit oligopolistic cell system). I know exactly where I could get a basic cell plan for $7/month + 3c/MB, or an unlimited data plan for $35/month (throttled after 1.5 GB). I know that it wouldn't actually be very hard for me to afford it, if only I could talk myself into it. And it's certainly a hell of a lot cheaper than a Disney ticket.

It's still a very different experience *psychologically*, though. Like...I don't know where it was, but people were talking on Tumblr a while back about how sometimes it's better to not have the option not to buy something, because now instead of just buying it you're faced with the options of "buy the thing (and feel like you're wasting money)" and "don't buy the thing (and be deprived of it)", both of which are unpleasant.

(They were talking about the possibility of standing-room-only airplanes (in exchange for a lower ticket price than the current one), and how that could end up making having a seat feel like a frivolous thing that one cannot in good conscience spend money on, even if a purely rational version of themself would conclude that they *did* value having a seat more than the $X additional charge and happily pay it.)

And with Internet, there's also the altruistic warm-fuzzies of a blanket system, and other benefits-from-ensuring-that-*everyone*-gets-it like being able to email someone and know that they'll be able to receive it. I get that there are sound reasons to prefer that the government stay out of it, but I think it would probably be easier, psychologically, to pay taxes towards a blanket system than to pay for an individual mobile-data connection and not *just* because I'm too poor to be eligible to pay taxes.

Every so often I hear about people who want to set up a Universal Basic Internet satellite network, providing the world with Internet slow enough that the vast majority of people who currently pay for Internet access will still do so, but such that you aren't *completely* screwed without a subscription. AFAICT none of these plans have ever gone anywhere, and I have no idea what I could do to help such a plan along, but I think I would like to live in a world where they've succeeded.