Brinens and Things

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:

[none suitable for this section]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by rustingbridges) Making your home's heating robust against electricity outages. (Despite what you might think, having a natural-gas furnace is actually pretty useless for this.) [three comments]

[cw: corporate bullshit] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by siderea) Tips on wresting control of your smartphone back from the corps.

[cw: poverty, (arguably) death] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by spacefroggity) Is the availability of cheap gemstones (thanks to lab-growing techniques) good? Depends on what jewellery is for.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by rustingbridges) Getting used to OpenStreetMaps.

[cw: poverty, homelessness, discourse (earlier in thread)] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by muchnerve; in response to togglessymposium) What would a world that outlawed long-term rental of living space look like?

[arguably cw: poverty] [Modern FImily; Wayback] (OP by Court and Adam) Self-knowledge is key to a fulfilling life.

(I mean also I kind of *do* feel deprived, but largely because I'm not saving *enough*, seeing as how it's not mathematically possible to save enough when you're only making like ten grand a year in the first place. But that's another matter, and not something I really wanted to get into there: I basically wrote that comment in character as probable-medium-term-future!me. And I *am* better off than in, like, 2017, so there's that.)

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Links:

[arguably cw: amnesia] [Medway Music; Wayback] (by Steve Cole) A guide on how to preserve your local music scene using the Internet Archive.



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

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