Brinens and Things

Comments on my own posts:

[cw: venting, (mild) kidnapping] The one about emergency alerts

[mild cw: injury, war] One man's modus ponens [no new comments from me unless you count the tags, but worth noting these comments from rustingbridges]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: food] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by YuckyTom; in response to jadagul) How to instantiate supposedly-nonexistent kitchen appliances.

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Links:

[arguably cw: unsanitary] [Region of Waterloo] A virtual tour of a landfill and recycling centre.

[fairly abstract cw: discourse, war] [Tumblr; Wayback] (by togglesbloggle) I'm not sure what I think about this post (about culture war and Twitter poisoning, with Go metaphors), but it's interesting.

Four laugh-rule entries:

[cw: what it says on the tin] [Anchor] (by Jess and Sam)

Jess: Mindless Matters is an 18+ podcast that features live inductions. Please, do not listen while you are driving. Do not listen while you are doing important things that [need necessary focus?], don't endanger yourself...you are *responsible* for ensuring your own safety.

Sam: It's called "not safe for work" for a reason!

[Rock Paper Shotgun; Wayback] (by Nate Crowley)

Enter Wartales, then, which maddens me with the urge to append "woo-hoo" to its name every time I type it.

[Incognito Money Scribe; Wayback] (by Jacob Schroeder)

In other words, the $1.50 hot dog is synonymous with the Costco brand. The money-losing frankfurter is a part of the company’s identity. It is a staple for customers to recharge after buying five pounds of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, 50 rolls of toilet paper and a coffin.

(Wait, do people actually eat at the Costco restaurant? ...I was gonna say "well, I guess of course people must or Costco would have shut it down", but, uh, it kind of sounds like they're running a food stand for the Aesthetic, so maybe they *wouldn't* have shut it down for mere lack of business.

Is the food any good?)

[strong cw: corporate bullshit] [Wall Street Journal (paywalled, but apparently my university alumni account still gets me Wall Street Journal access)] (by Jeff Horwitz; h/t Matt Levine)

Other flubbed enforcement actions were taken against the accounts of [...] Mr. Zuckerberg himself, whose live-streamed employee Q&A had been suppressed after an algorithm classified it as containing misinformation.

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

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Comments on my own posts:

The one about Signal [four comments]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by reasonableapproximation) Radical self-expression through clothing.

[cw: embarrassment squick] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by rustingbridges; partly in response to sigmaleph) The confusing proliferation of names in Worm. [two comments, three if you count the tags]

[cw: food] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by BagelofDeath) Honest Chinese food reviews from a Chinese restaurant owner. (Also, advice on how to get good chicken fingers in Canada.)

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by grayestofghosts) Sometimes reading less is a reasonable response to changing circumstances.

[cw: food] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by moral-autism) Some types of professionally preserved foods we highly recommend trying.

[maybe cw: stalking] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by nerviovago; in response to plain-dealing-villain and moral-autism) Hiding secret passageways inside fake clothes dryers.

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Links:

[cw: nsfw text, (mild) death] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (by arihi) A new repository for mind-control erotica, one that is *not* built on 90's tech with 90's limitations.

[Rock Paper Shotgun; Wayback] (by Nate Crowley) I thought this was going to be about priest-based Age of Empires builds, but the thing it actually is is neat too.

Three laugh-rule entries:
[Bloomberg; Wayback crawling forbidden] (by Matt Levine)

Or combine the last two approaches: “At the end of each trading day from now on, the number of Tesla shares will be adjusted, via split or reverse split, such that each day’s closing price is $420.69.” A share of Tesla could represent a variable percentage interest in the company, but always be worth $420.69. Elon you can live this dream if you want it enough.

[Kiwix; Wayback] (by Stéphane Coillet-Matillon)

I wish I could tell you how we did it, but it involved some C++, Typescript, and sacrificing a few chicken. Only two of these three worked, and there’s still some discussion about which.

[cw: politics] [The Guardian; Wayback] (by Lauren Aratani)
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There is a blanket [cw: illness] on the rest of this post.

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Comments on my own posts:

[none this time]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by yvannairie) In which we are all uncomfortable with the word "simp", though not all for the same initial reasons.

[cw: food, poison, medical stuff] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by mindstalk; partly in response to marycatelli) On drug-grapefruit interactions. [three comments]

[mild cw: war, apocalypse] [AO3; Wayback] (OP by nostalgebraist) Very belated Almost Nowhere reactionblogging.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by invertedporcupine) What are the boundaries of "several"? Also, what are the boundaries of "the other day"?

[WordPress part 1 (Tumblr part 1); WordPress part 2 (Tumblr part 2)] (OP by voxette-vk; in response to rustingbridges) The etymology of the name "Ontario" makes it an especially bad choice to be stolen by a town in the California desert. [two or three comments, depending on how you count]

[cw: homophobia, discourse, amnesia, (arguably) politics] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by feotakahari; partly in response to wingedcatgirl) Can we *please* not double-down on that rotten-to-the-core "born this way" argument? Especially not in this Minitrue way? [two comments]

[cw: violence, amnesia] [AO3; Wayback] (OP by Benedict_SC) Even more belated The Bleeding Heart of the Oborozuka Vampire theorising, now that I speak Umineko and therefore have *some* idea of what is going on.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by dagny-hashtaggart) Jules Verne and teaboos. [two comments]

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Links:

Laugh rule:
[Rock Paper Shotgun; Wayback] (by Nate Crowley)

But for me, it was the classic multiplayer combat experience: radio silence on my side (except the occasional amiable Frenchman, mumbling in short bursts from the heart of a collapsing crisp factory), and a pitiless raptor squad of born killers on the other side, functioning with the lethal efficiency of a hive mind.

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

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I was too tired to do this last week, so here is a longer three-week post.


Comments on my own posts:

Another mind-blowing these-songs-are-by-the-same-person fact:

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Comments on other people's posts:

(This is from March 4th, but I overlooked it while making the previous roundups.) [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by archosaur-automaton) The adorable cover of this textbook is harder to appreciate when you've actually taken the course it's used for.

[mild cw: food, apocalypse] (This is from April 8th, but I overlooked it while making the previous roundups.) [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by 1rakus) A quiz with weird question weightings, and a digression on emergency power generation.

[arguably cw: aging] (This is from April 24th, but I overlooked it while making the previous roundup.) [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by thejogging) The many meanings of a half-broken key.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by sigmaleph) A short puzzle game about meeting password construction requirements.

[cw: amnesia] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by staff) Tumblr is ramping up its censorship, under the guise of "keeping hate speech in check".

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by wolffyluna) Fun with Project Gutenberg.

[cw: food] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by rustingbridges) Preference ranking of starches.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by wolffyluna) Space-efficient email apps.

[cw: nsfw text, (mild) discourse] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by tototavros; also in response to shieldfoss and eightyonekilograms) Today in people getting separated by a common language (and not always geographically): how to distinguish between different types of plug. [three comments]

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by lavenderfables) I like Rincewind *because* of his cowardice, not in spite of it.

[cw: Pyrebound spoilers] [WordPress part 1; WordPress part 2; WordPress part 3; Wayback part 1; Wayback part 2; Wayback part 3] (OP by theredsheep) Pyrebound reactionblogging. (It's amazing! If you're okay with stories getting pretty dark sometimes, go read it!) [four comments]

(I noticed while archiving those that each section had exactly one previous crawl, manually requested, starting in July 2019 but continuing for the post written afterward. It's good to see that someone has taken the story under their wing.)

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Links:

[none suitable for this section]



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

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Comments on my own posts:

[none this time]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by mindstalk) Coping with pollen allergies.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by yvannairie) Siikr is a very useful tool.

[Blogspot; Wayback] (OP by Michael Mock) I finally listened to Beneath the Skin! Maybe someday I'll even get around to those 300 other songs! [four comments, two of which are new, two of which are old enough to pre-date my practice of comment roundups]

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by yvannairie) The hassle (or not) of moving between phones.

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Links:

[cw: nsfw text] [Tumblr; Wayback] (by unpretty) An *extremely* relatable series of posts about how hard it is to find good porn without other, turn-off fetishes snuck into it.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (by lewisandquark; h/t itsbenedict) The first lines of nonexistent novels, written by GPT-2. I want to read so many of these.

Laugh rule:
[cw: drugs] [Rock Paper Shotgun; Wayback] (by Nate Crowley) Deadliest Catch: The Game.

and queued up a spotify playlist that was just different covers of “Wanted Dead or Alive” by Bon Jovi on repeat.

Comments on my own posts:

Comment and Link Roundup: October 14, 2019 [three comments]

Delayed reactionblogging: 'A Confusion of Princes,' by Garth Nix [two comments, not counting the edit notice]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: food] (Note: this post is subject to a formatting glitch. The last post is still last, but all *other* posts in the thread are in reversed order.) [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by star-anise; second response is to misskillamarmalade) No Name's graphic design is very itself. (I mean this as a compliment.) [two comments]

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by wolffyluna) Incompetent redirects to country-specific websites. [two comments]

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by contrarianarchon) Paradoxical lullaby effects.

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Links:

[Tumblr; Wayback] (by carry-on-my-wayward-butt; h/t itsmaledict (Halloween alt of itsbenedict)) Ex nihilo fandom memes.

[WordPress; Wayback] (by Siggy) The 2019 Ace Community Survey is now open!

Two laugh-rule entries:
[Harvard; Wayback] (by James Mickens) Hey, remember "The Night Watch"? Turns out the guy's written some other hilarious stuff too, such as this:

Yes, I am aware of the “use a vivid image” technique, and if I lived in a sensory deprivation tank and I had never used the Internet, I could easily remember a password phrase like “Gigantic Martian Insect Party.” Unfortunately, I *have* used the Internet, and this means that I have seen, heard, and occasionally paid money for every thing that could ever be imagined. I have seen a video called “Gigantic Martian Insect Party,” and I have seen another video called “Gigantic Martian Insect Party 2: Don’t Tell Mom,” and I hated both videos, but this did not stop me from directing the sequel “Gigantic Martian Insect Party Into Darkness.” Thus, it is extremely difficult for me to generate a memorable image that can distinguish itself from the seething ocean of absurdities that I store as a result of consuming 31 hours of media in each 24-hour period.

[cw: food, alcohol] [McSweeneys; Wayback] (by Ross Bullen; h/t Matt Levine)

Brandon (age 4) is currently on a five-meal streak of throwing away any piece of food that does not bear a sufficiently strong resemblance to Olaf from Frozen.

Comments on my own posts:

Not a comment exactly, but I found and edited in the context link I wanted for that post about dual-boot issues

[cw: illness, venting] The one about pollen allergies [two comments]

In which Brin learns to speak another dialect of Pokemon

[cw: abuse, self-harm] The one about catharsis

[cw: poverty] The one about Pokemon Go

Me, arguing with my new credit-card company about signup bonuses

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: death, asphyxiation] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by exigencelost) What would breathing feel like if you didn't need air to live?

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by gasmaskaesthetic) Paper vs electronic paycheques. [three comments]

[cw: Christian fundamentalism] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by thedarlingone) Not sure *how* this feeds into Their plots, but it can't be good.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by etirabys) How to ensure camera privacy.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by thedarlingone) Video-game serial monogamy. [two comments, one of which is new]

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by sigmaleph) "Throuple"? Really?

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by quoms; in response to rustingbridges) The intricacies of rounded cash transactions. [three comments]

[mild cw: death, misgendering] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by transsexualite; in response to serinemolecule) Customer honorifics.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by official-voice; in response to sigmaleph) There are even better 2020-vision jokes yet to come.

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Links:

Two laugh-rule entries:
[Twitter; Wayback doesn't seem to handle long Twitter threads well, though you can see some of it here] (by dsquareddigest; h/t Matt Levine)

as well as the PE ratio, block trading and the team, Goldman Sachs invented Europe.

[Bloomberg; Wayback crawling forbidden] (by Matt Levine)

True, there is some history of huge exogenous discoveries of precious metals causing monetary disruption, but the important thing to realize is that that was back when precious metals were money. Now bringing back a gajillion tons of gold from outer space would not increase the money supply, because the money supply is not linked to gold. It would just decrease the price of gold. It would be super disruptive to gold miners, sure! The rest of us would be fine.

[...]

Now if they find an asteroid that is made out of Bitcoin, that will be economically significant.

I was feeling like I might want to play some Pokemon, but the thought of dealing with the location and Internet-access logistics of Pokemon Go was stressful†.

And then I thought "Maybe it's time I played a core Pokemon game."

After a little bit of poking around, I installed a Game Boy Color emulator on my smartphone†† and...obtained (look, it's not like you can buy them from the manufacturer anymore anyway) a copy of Pokemon Crystal.

I've barely begun--only just made it to Cherrygrove, don't even have any Pokeballs yet--but I'm enjoying it so far. I was a little surprised at first that nobody seems to mind me barging into their homes and poking all their stuff to see what examine text pops up, but then I remembered that this is a common RPG conceit.

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†Especially now that Dad is the one holding the Person With a Data Plan title: his phone's mobile-hotspot function is broken, his model is the kind where you have to disassemble half the thing just to get the SIM card in and out, and he is often at work at times that I would want to play.

††I know you *can* get PC versions, even Linux, but I figured I'd go for a more Authentic Handheld Experience.

A couple weeks ago Runescape went back into not-working-on-Linux mode. I tried playing on Windows for a while, but it's *so* annoying having to switch operating systems for it. I hate having to choose, on a scale of *hours*, between "Runescape" and "everything else". I can't pop in for five minutes to check on something, I can't have stuff running in the background while I play, and I can't work on other things here and there on breaks. Probably nobody else pays close enough attention to notice (I haven't been making announcements, just quietly updating my Tumblr user profile with the current status), but my rate of Wordpress-archive formatting has definitely suffered. (admittedly I also worked more hours the past couple weeks, but still, I think the operating-system problem was a significant factor)

(Also, my Windows screen-brightness control is broken, and I have not figured out a way to fix it. I found a third-party screen dimmer that works, but sometimes the brightness Windows is stuck on is too *dim* for my current needs, and third-party screen *brightening* seems to be much harder. And it insists on reverting to UTC whenever I reboot, though if you check its timezone it still claims to be on Eastern time.)

I tried playing a couple more Linux-friendly games, seeing if I could coax my brain into phase with them, but I'm just not in the mood.

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The problem with the Runescape Linux client is that it was made for use on Ubuntu 14.04, and while they've made a few minor tweaks to it since then they've never gone back and really updated it to work properly on newer versions.

Last night, a thought occurred to me:

"Hmm, I wonder what would happen if I tried the overkill approach?"

So I tried the overkill approach: I made an Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine and tried installing the client on *that*.

It...kind of actually works? After a couple initial tests to see how high-spec I could make the machine without it lagging my whole computer (conveniently, you can edit the specs of a machine *after* you make it; no need to start from scratch), I seem to have ended up with a machine that can run Runescape at 2 fps. And like, I spent *years* playing Runescape on a machine that got 2 fps, that is empirically a thing that I have been known to do. As I mentioned recently, I already don't do forms of gameplay that require fast reaction times.

(*Way* back in the day, I used to play Runescape on a machine that would freeze up for *several minutes* every time it had to load a new area of the map. I remember keeping a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by my laptop *specifically* for the purpose of having something to do while I waited for the map to load.)

I might try knocking the graphics quality down a bit more, see if that helps.

(context)

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Well, to be fair, there are definitely some aspects of the way my mind and life work that would tend to make it easier for me to handle this:

1. The video-game playstyle that meshes well with my brain is very much depth-over-breadth: I prefer to play a small number of games that each offer an indefinite or near-indefinite number of playtime hours, rather than a large number of small games. A game taking longer to complete if you don't spend money isn't necessarily a problem: sometimes it just means postponing the day where I go "wait, crap, I actually *finished* that game, *now* what I am going to do when I feel like playing it". (This also means that I don't really have experience with all that *many* games.)

2. While I am as much of a sucker for unlockables as the next guy, I generally don't care about cosmetic stuff for its own sake. (Not really into aesthetics much.)

3. I don't enjoy gambling unless it's the kind where the outcome is always positive (just by varying amounts). (I'm *willing* to make possible-loss gambles if I'm confident enough that the expected value is positive, but it's not fun; negative-expected-value and insufficient-information gambles don't even have *that* going for them.)

4. While I *have* a minimum-wage job, that doesn't mean I can just pick up an additional hour of minimum-wage at will. My *marginal* wage is about $1/hour, and an extremely tedious $1/hour at that. As I understand it a lot of games will let you make a couple bucks of premium currency per hour at the margin, hoping that your marginal wage is high enough that the calculations come out in favour of spending another hour at work and then using the money on premium currency, but *even if you ignore in-game methods being more fun* my calculations often come out in favour of in-game methods.

(Huh, I guess that--in a way, and to an extent--those games *do* price-discriminate: if you're so poor that a couple bucks an hour sounds like a good deal, they don't charge you.)

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Of the six games that I currently play at least occasionally, three have some form of microtransaction element.

Flight Rising: the dev-run microtransaction store deals pretty much exclusively in stuff I don't care about (non-unlockable cosmetics, things to speed up a part of the game I don't even play much anyway), so the only point in getting premium currency at all is to trade it with other players. (The Flight Rising player economy runs on a fully-fledged dual-currency system: the player marketplace has an option to denote your item's sale price in premium currency, there are player-run exchange booths on the forums with floating exchange rates, and other player-run services will generally take both currencies.) Premium currency inflates less than the regular kind (though the regular kind of inflation isn't hyper- or anything), so I use exchange booths and arbitrage tricks to keep most of my money in premium form.

Marginal wage is maybe $2.50 - $3/hour, though mostly because I am very good at FR merchanting.

(Note also that the prevailing interest rate (denominated in premium currency) is *much* higher than in the real world: 35%/year is extremely simple and pretty low-risk to obtain (and zero risk of outright loss), and with somewhat more care and more understanding of the economic patterns, 50% is only slightly harder. Most people either never save up enough to make the investment at all (the extremely-simple investment is in increments of $20), or are unwilling to tie up that much money for several months.)


Runescape: microtransaction store has a bunch of cosmetic unlocks that I *might* save up for one day if I run out of higher-priority things to do; a few useful things like increases in item storage space that I will probably save up for somewhat sooner (though for item-storage-space specifically I am nowhere near running out, so that's a pretty low priority too); gambling (with a small number of free plays per day; because of point 3 I am perfectly content to take the free plays and then stop); and a premium-currency form of the membership subscription (which gives you access to a *lot* more content) they've been doing since before microtransactions were really a thing (I used to pay money for this, but the moment they introduced premium currency (and legalised gold-farming to obtain it) I switched to that method instead).

Marginal wage is about $2/hour if you are bad at both bossing and micro-ing (I am bad at both), $4.60 if you are good at both, and $2.60 if you are good at micro-ing but not bossing. (To be good at bossing you must also be good at micro-ing.) Non-marginal wage is about $4 - $5.60/hour and is sufficient to pay for membership at my current level but not by much (I'm currently doing a bunch of the more marginal methods because I want to have more buffer for when I'm not playing as much); at higher levels it's more than enough, and I put a higher priority on levelling that gives access to more non-marginal gold-farming methods than on levelling that doesn't.

(The Runescape player economy is larger, more complicated, and more difficult to get clear information on than the Flight Rising one, so--for the moment, anyway--I'm not very good at Runescape arbitrage or investing. (I did make a spreadsheet to determine the most profitable form of livestock-farming, though!))


Pokemon Go: the only natively mobile one (though I hear many people make do with accessing the Flight Rising desktop website on mobile, and Runescape is working on a mobile client), and indeed the most aggressive. Certainly the hardest in which to gain premium currency through in-game methods: last I checked, there was a 50c/day cap on the sole available method, so if you're capable of maxing that out every day (I usually can't, but then I'm not very good at Pokemon Go) the marginal wage is zero.

Still, at 50c/day you can max out your storage space in...five-ish months, if I've got the figures right? And you get one free raid pass per day (though you're only allowed to accumulate a one-day buffer). And you get some of the time-saving consumables through levelling up (which means the supply through that method is finite, since there are only so many levels to gain). So while it *is* very much trying to entice you into buying stuff (not even counting transportation costs; I only show up to places if I can get there on foot or was going to go there anyway, but I know a lot of players who drive around), it's also very much possible to play with just what you can get in-game. There's still plenty of things to catch and train and so on after you've run out of raid passes for the day.


(The other three games, in case you were wondering, are Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, Age of Empires III, and Nethack.)