Brinens and Things

(part 3)

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Mom thought going straight to ripping up swaths of the feral meadow this year was too extreme, so I am scaling up amaranth production more gradually. This year I have planted one (six foot by two foot) bed.

I went out to give it a watering, and there are a bunch of tiny amaranth sprigs in the bed!!

(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.)

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:

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]

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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).

Comments on my own posts:

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

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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.

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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".)

I took a vacation, this past week. A vacation, not from *productivity*, but from *prioritising*.

I did accomplish things, but (apart from my job) I did so by fixing whichever problem happened to be bugging me at any given moment.

It was nice. I didn't have to spend mental energy on juggling which things to do when. It was invigorating, to see a problem and simply *do* something about it rather than have to ignore it and let it keep aching in the back of my mind while I worked on something Objectively More Important. Over the course of the week, I fixed quite a few of the little things that had been aching in me: though the big things remain (and some of the little things), there's a lot to be said for having a smaller *number* of problems.

Also I...think I might have needed less sleep? It could be a coincidence, but I woke up earlier than usual most days, despite going to bed at the same time. Even ovulation was about half its normal length.

I'll see if I can find a way to make time for this more often. Maybe ration out the interminable job hunt to a more sustainable frequency.

(inspired by https://dynomight.net/training/)


* Retractable keychains: so you can keep your key attached to your bag *and* unlock the door with it at the same time.


* Foaming soap dispensers: pre-lathered, for your convenience. Also means liquid soap is less likely to fly out of your hands while trying to lather it and go to waste. I've been reusing a Bath and Body Works foam dispenser for several years, refilling it with store-brand liquid soap diluted with an ~equal amount of water.


* Alcohol wipes: you probably know about their uses in first aid and injections, but did you know they're also great for disinfecting smartphones? Unlike Lysol wipes, they don't leave a residue on your screen, and they don't gradually disintegrate the biodegradeable case your phone came with. If you've adopted the practice of washing your hands upon returning home (also highly recommended, BTW), consider adding these to your decontamination routine.

(Note: the general consensus seems to be that unprotected screens can *probably* handle disinfectants, but that to be on the safe side it's better to have a screen protector.)


* Emesis bags: Do you sleep in a loft bed, making it difficult to rush to the toilet in an emergency? Do you have a history of stomach bugs that linger for weeks or months? Are you tired of banging into the bucket at the foot of your bed when you roll over?

...no? Just me? Well, you should be aware of the existence of emesis bags *anyway*, just in case.


* Couch blankets: to help keep you warm without having to keep the heat turned up as much. I bring one of my bed's blanket layers downstairs with me in the morning and bring it back up at night.


* Acoustic earmuffs: for when people are polluting your soundscape. Sounds won't disappear completely (at least with my model) unless they were already fairly faint, but they'll at least be softer and easier to ignore. (Mine is one of the generic Chinese ones: they were going by MPOW at the time, but it looks like their current incarnation is ProCase.)

(It might work even better in combination with earplugs, but I can't stand having things in my ear canal.)


* Shoulder-strap water-bottle pouches: as a kid I used to have a small water bottle on my utility belt, but I've found these to be more convenient to use.


* Anti-onion goggles: for those of you who like onions, or those of us who occasionally make onion-containing dishes for other people. (Also good against any other particulate you don't want getting in your eyes: for most people onions pose the most day-to-day threat, but once you have goggles lying around you can also use them when heading into plumes of wildfire smoke, sickrooms, and so on.) These ones fit okay over glasses.


* Shopping bags that fold up into a built-in pouch: good to have one on hand for when you unexpectedly need to carry things. Mine is a grocery store-brand bag from a store that doesn't seem to make them anymore.

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Some things I didn't include in this list because I already wrote about them elsewhere: utility belts, sun lamps, popcorn salt in shaker bottles, mosquito-net suits, pocket umbrellas, Aveeno oat-and-shea-butter moisturiser, and of course pollen masks.