Brinens and Things

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.)

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.)

As a side effect of my projects to take more control over my digital life (in this case, de-googling my email), brinbellway.net is now a live domain. For the foreseeable future it redirects to brin-bellway.dreamwidth.org: if the location of my primary Internet presence changes, I'll update it accordingly.

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If we know each other and you'd like to exchange email addresses, just ask. I was surprised and a little concerned by just how *few* people there were to send the change-of-address-notice email out to.

(This is a techy enough social sphere that somebody might very well ask, and the answer is that I don't have a PGP key *yet*. I'm waiting for Thunderbird to finish implementing their PGP integration: apparently they released the beta last month. I'll leave the beta testing to people who already have experience working with PGP.)

I've been wanting my Dreamwidth hyperlinks to have underlines for a while, to make it easier to distinguish adjacent links from one another. Yesterday I did some research and managed to work out that one wants the "custom CSS" field for that, and found a copy of the code I would need. (Well, I found a copy of code for how to *remove* some underlines, but once I had the syntax it was easy enough to plug different things into it.)

As a bonus, while researching this I came across a guide that--among other things--describes how to make those fancy linked footnotes so you don't have to scroll back and forth trying to find your place! They're much simpler to make than I'd expected: I'd kind of assumed they required some kind of deep infrastructure and were only possible on sites that were deliberately set up to support them (I rarely see them on non-self-hosted pages, and I think the exceptions tend to be the sort of hosts that might well put effort into allowing for that). But no, it's actually pretty basic HTML.

If you mark a Dreamwidth post as "viewer discretion advised" (presumably 18+ would do this as well), the Internet Archive cannot crawl it. Whether you consider this a downside or an upside is up to you, but it's worth knowing either way.

(If one specifically *sets out* to scrape Dreamwidth one can edit one's scraper bot to include a "show me discretion-advised posts" cookie, but generalised scrapers like the Wayback Machine can't get past the "are you sure you want to continue" page.)

It could easily be a coincidence, but I do wonder if it says something about, like, the slower pace of Dreamwidth and its embrace of asynchronous communication, that I meet so many Australians on here.

(who cares if we have opposite schedules, we'll just have conversations in which responses are spaced twelve hours apart, it's not like this is Discord)

On Tumblr you hear jokes like "you know you're up late when you start seeing Australians"†, but here the process is more "*wakes up, goes downstairs, turns on laptop* ah, time to see what the Australians have been up to today".

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†I would like to point out that I *do* read my entire Tumblr dash, in chronological order, but there does seem to be a common assumption on Tumblr that people don't do that.

Comments on my own posts:

[cw: poverty, first-world problems, government bullshit] The one about the burden of U.S. citizenship [three comments]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by cryptovexillologist) Children keeping unimportant secrets as practice.

[cw: amnesia] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by thedarlingone) Current (lack of) fannish blogging platforms. [three comments]

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by thedarlingone) Dreamwidth writing styles. [two comments]

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by contrarianarchon) Inspiring videos from space agencies. [two comments]

[cw: illness, food]
( Read more... )

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Links:

Laugh rule:
[New York Times; Wayback] (by Caity Weaver; h/t Matt Levine)

I investigated the possibility of purchasing Dunkaroos on the Dark Web, and discovered to my horror that three people in Australia had recently been charged with running a syndicate that moved roughly $12 million worth of drugs “disguised as candy” across the country. I envisioned myself ripping the foil from a pack of hard-won Dunkaroos and finding only LSD tabs inside. I couldn’t handle that kind of letdown.

The link roundup I got this from quoted the line “I transformed my iPhone into a landline by disabling notifications for every application except calls, and leaving it plugged into a wall outlet in my kitchen.”, and I would like to point out that if you need a landline-like thing for any reason, leaving a cell phone plugged into a spot in your house is in many cases cheaper than an actual landline. (assuming you choose your phone plan right, of course) Use a flip phone, though, unless you were going to have a spare iPhone lying around anyway.

If you want, you can get a gateway that allows you to connect the phone to your house's landline infrastructure: that way you can have multiple receivers in various parts of the house. We have this one, although it was cheaper at the time we bought it and might not still be the best option.

(We used to leave a flip phone plugged into a living-room outlet, but when Dad started needing a cell plan we gave the number to him. While it does mean he has to relay messages received while out and about (it still connects to the gateway when he's home), it beats needing to buy a separate plan.)

Updated my Dreamwidth profile to reflect the fact that I actually use my Dreamwidth now.

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.