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.)

(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.)