Brinens and Things

Comments on my own posts:

[cw: illness] The one about sore throats and impending doom [two comments]


[cw: government bullshit] ""Fun"" fact of the day (March 1, 2024)


[fairly mild cw: illness] 2020s music, part 3

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: corporate bullshit] [Thoughts of Mine; Wayback] (OP by Mabel Schaefer) Fun with cell-phone-plan loopholes. [two or three comments, depending on how you count]


[cw: what it says on the tin] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by slavicafire) Food-disgust test.


[cw: food (with picture)] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by lnthefade) This is a thing that is now, unfortunately, not being offered at Disney World.


[fairly mild cw: discourse] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by mindstalk) A modest proposal for affordable food/housing.


[cw: illness] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by siderea) Changing mask tech for a changing world.

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Links:

[cw: death, (arguably) discourse] [New York Times - Wayback] (by Helen Ouyang; h/t swimmer) The race to reinvent CPR.


[Crystalverse; Wayback] (by Chase) How to grow pyramid salt crystals.

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.)

*flump*

[muffled by lying facedown] hello and welcome to the Q4 edition of this fortnightly roundup

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Comments on my own posts:

[cw: illness, medical, food] Status update, morning of 2023-08-01 [four comments]


[arguably cw: apocalypse] Friday Five: August 25, 2023


[cw: food, poverty] Extreme couponing [two comments on Tumblr]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: apocalypse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by c-rowlesdraws) The fictional for now cultural symbolism of auroras.


[cw: illness, apocalypse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by stumpyjoepete; partly in response to nuclearspaceheater) Air-purifier recs.


[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by lonelyroommp3) The psychological importance of tidy surfaces.


[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by sigmaleph) What does "soul" even mean, anyway?


[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by moonlit-tulip) VPNs and Tumblr shadowbanning. (Update: they *eventually* un-shadowbanned me, several weeks after I contacted them.) [two comments]


[arguably cw: amnesia] [Start of WordPress thread (Tumblr part 1; Tumblr part 2; Tumblr part 3; Tumblr part 4)] (OP by calware; also in response to lizardywizard) Pi and the overestimation of common knowledge; speaking of senseless, fortunately-lifted Tumblr bans... [two comments, sort of]


[cw: illness] [Start of WordPress thread (Tumblr part 1; Tumblr part 2)] (OP by rustingbridges) Nipping colds in the bud (maybe) with zinc lozenges. (They *do* sell Life Extension in Canada, it turns out.)

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Links:

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by sun-dari, but read the whole thread) Pun translations in Good Omens.


[Substack; Wayback] (by Adrian Hon; h/t wolffyluna) Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser: a LARP event from a post-scarcity (or at least much richer) society that tried to manifest on a world not prosperous enough to support it. (Or at least, that was *my* takeaway from the article.)


[Taiwan Quest; Wayback] (by Zhen-Kang) Discouraging under-the-table transactions via a government receipt lottery.


[strong cw: illness] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (by synecdochic) Modern COVID-testing technique. (Well, the post is mostly about other COVID-related things, but anyway.)


[cw: medical, (arguably) illness] [Ontario; America; Wayback 1; Wayback 2] (h/t cobaltdrgn) Did you know that fat people need a different size of vaccine needle?


[NASA; Wayback] We, the people of Earth, have obtained actual rocks from an actual asteroid!


[Dynomight; Wayback] (by Dynomight) The midwit home: smart enough to be helpful, not smart enough to betray you to the corporate overlords (or just be an overcomplicated pain in the ass).


[strong cw: poison, death] [Los Angeles Times; Wayback] (by Emily Alpert Reyes and Cindy Carcamo; h/t nuclearspaceheater) The terrible hidden cost of engineered-stone countertops.


Laugh rule:
[cw: (fairly strong) illness, (fairly strong) apocalypse, war] [Mastodon; Wayback] (by plaguepoems@mastodon.social)

Darker days ahead
she tells me
for all of us there are
darker days ahead
and as she delivers
this ominous declaration
I’m not really sure
if she means the plague
or the catastrophe
some other calamity
or daylight savings
but regardless of the specifics
I fear she is right.

Comments on my own posts:

Tips on Offline-First Smartphones, 2023 Edition [one comment on Dreamwidth, one comment on Tumblr]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by nuclearspaceheater) General life improvements of weightlifting.


[cw: illness, (fairly mild) venting] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by mindstalk) The spirit (and not just the letter) of mask rules.


[arguably cw: amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by unprettyextra; in response to etirabys) How to help archive Imgur. (Though Imgur has since started its deletions, the archiving project continues.)


[cw: embarrassment squick, (arguably) discourse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by hjartasalt; in response to nuclearspaceheater) American hegemony and (sort-of)-multi-currency cash registers.


[cw: amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by sigmaleph) How to (maybe) know your sleep latency.

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Links:

[arguably cw: amnesia] [Baturin; Wayback] (by Daniil Baturin) A review of a Windows-ripoff Linux distro from 2003.


Laugh-rule entries:
[WordPress; Wayback] (by Bret Devereaux)

This is the third part of the second part of our three(ish) part look at the governing structures of the Greek polis (I, IIa, IIb). At some point I promise I will write a series whose organization does not look like a parody of itself.

[Mastodon; Wayback] (h/t Seebs)

(here's the alt text on that image in case you want to stick it into Google Traduction:

ARRÊTEZ L'ANGLAIS – L'ANGLAIS N'EST PAS CENSÉE ÊTRE UNE LANGUE INTERNATIONALE – DES ANNÉES D’ANGLAIS et pourtant AUCUN INTERÊT parce qu’on peut regarder la version du film doublée par Kev Adams – Tu veux dire des trucs en anglais pour rigoler? On a un outil pour Ça, Ça s'appelle «GOOGLE TRADUCTION» – «Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Will, will Will will Will Will's will? All the faith he had had had had no effect on the outcome of his life» – Indistinguable d'un AVC REGARDE ce que les Anglais te demande de Respecter, avec tous les cours & voyages linguistiques qu’on fait pour les comprendre (Ce sont de VRAIS mots anglais, parlé par de VRAIS Anglais): Embezzling ????? gobbledygook ??????? discombobulated ????????????????? «The bamboozled children skedaddled»
Ils se sont foutus de notre gueule putaingue

[WordPress; Wayback] (by Crow)

In promoting her new book, the author also made a few choice memes. I can’t think of any other way to describe them.



They immediately without context are my kind of humour. Clickhole could post this and I’d send it to all my friends. Levelling is, as a reminder, a sometimes used term to describe killing god. These stock photos are very persuasive in getting me to love god, I’ll admit. I’ll say the unlevel memes are also quite tumblr ‘I dreamed of this meme and now it is real’ style.

[Know Your Meme; Wayback]






[cw: illness] [Armbrust; Wayback] Review of a terrible surgical mask.

"And look at the stare in his eyes. I mean, the woman is intense, but this dude, like something's going on there, man. It's the face of someone actually receiving the coronavirus into their body."

[AO3; Wayback] (by seasparks) I don't go here, I was just wiki-walking, but:

seasons of crappy Netflix that were deemed sufficiently bad to allow Canadian access to them

(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:

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).