Brinens and Things

(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:

The one about Recoll

[cw: what it says on the tin] The one about plague nightmares [one comment, not counting the postscript]

[fairly mild cw: war, amnesia] The one about remembrance poppies

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Comments on other people's posts:

[Substack; Wayback] (OP by Evan Þ) If you enjoy my posts in which I express wildly alien intuitions about things, you may enjoy me dipping my toes into a (very polite) discussion of free will. (At least, I assume these intuitions are wildly alien from how often I see people say things that only make sense under different intuition sets. In any case, we are pleased to offer the finest autoxenoanthropology here at Brinens and Things.) [two comments]

[cw: poverty, venting] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by catchymemes) In which I have a lot of psychological baggage around museums.

[cw: death, aging, apocalypse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by treadwells) Cottagecore and a broader view of danger.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by mindstalk) The hole in comparative social-media discussions left by ignorance of Tumblr.

[cw: food, poison, illness, (arguably) death] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by ultraviolet-divergence) Dealing with the latest big listeria outbreak.

[cw: (strong) illness, (strong) apocalypse, bugs] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by siderea; in response to ewt) The wonders of PPE, climate-catastrophe edition.

[fairly mild cw: corporate bullshit] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by rustingbridges; in response to bulbous-oar) How to selectively prevent Android apps from accessing the Internet.

[Scribble Hub; Wayback] (OP by wingedcatgirl) Isekais and the importance of caution when carrying irreplaceable otherworldly technology.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by headspace-hotel) Poetic meter and artistic instincts.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by reptile-ruler) Fighting Tumblr's slippage down the slope towards Internet silos.

[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. [two comments, sort of]

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Links:

[Imgur; Wayback] Live wire-sculpture (not to be confused with live-wire sculpture).

[arguably cw: injury, embarrassment squick] [Hackaday; Wayback] (by Lewin Day) False positives on Apple's automatic car-crash 911 calling.

[CBS; Wayback] (by Phil Galewitz) Over-the-counter hearing aids now available in the United States.

(Although I am also having feelings about this sentence:

A pair of prescription devices typically sells for {{USD}}$2,000 to $8,000.

Only if you're getting ripped off, dude. Go to Costco. *So* glad we told the non-chain hearing-aid centre to go fuck themselves when they wanted six grand: the perfectly fine Costco hearing aids were CAD$1,800 *before* the $1,000 government subsidy. (that's not even *counting* the refundable tax credits I might be able to wring out of it))

[Kiwix; Wayback] What is the size of Wikipedia? (Also, your regular reminder that Kiwix is amazing and you should check it out. (And it gets even *better* than amazing after you figure out how to make your own ZIM files.))

[AO3; Wayback] (by Edonohana; h/t Ozy Brennan) The intricacies of tardigrade literature.

[cw: what it says on the tin] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (by siderea) Stop relying on Twitter for third-party authentication.

[cw: what it says on the tin] [Science; Wayback] (by Arevalo et al; h/t KelseyTUOC) A 20-valent influenza vaccine, containing examples of every known flu subtype. Works well in mice and ferrets, soon to be tested in primates and--hopefully--humans. In addition to the obvious benefits, it shows promise of providing cross-protection against novel influenza strains.


Three laugh-rule entries:
[cw: corporate bullshit] [Twitter; Wayback] (by rahaeli) Sporking the Cohost terms of service.

[Youtube; Wayback] (by Lauren Lopez and Robert Manion; h/t Blazing Darkness) Bella Swan is sixteen, going on seventeen...

[cw: scopophobia, (arguably) corporate bullshit] [Reddit; Wayback] (h/t trivialagent) It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you.

Comments on my own posts:

[cw: apocalypse] A future that may ask a lot of you

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: rape, discourse] [Dreamwidth; Wayback crawling forbidden] (OP by feotakahari; partly in response to random_thought_depository) Sex and emotional bonding. [six comments]

[cw: what it says on the tin, amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by etirabys) The masochist's path to enlightenment.

(although upon reflection I should have specified "pain and power-exchange" rather than BDSM, since I do kind of have a thing for safety harnesses and I suppose that technically qualifies under B)

[cw: politics, (arguably) discourse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by timemachineyeah) The difficulties of pre-Internet information-gathering, and/or the difficulties of childhood information-gathering.

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Links:

[cw: what it says on the tin] [Nuclear Advice; Unprepared Life; Wayback part 1; Wayback part 2] (first link by Rob Wiblin; second by Josh Centers) Some guides to surviving a nuclear strike, for those of us who have been wondering.

[NASA; Wayback] "NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has established an extraordinary new benchmark: detecting the light of a star that existed within the first billion years after the universe’s birth in the big bang – the farthest individual star ever seen to date."

Two laugh-rule entries:
[A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry; Wayback] (by Bret Devereaux)

when Caesar had himself proclaimed dictator perpetuo, an office he held for all of two months

[Tumblr; Wayback] (by Team AC) I'm not familiar with the context here, but it's a neat medium.

Today I visited the alternate universe where the Sesame Street song "It Sure Is Hot" code-switches between English and *Spanish*, rather than between English and Hebrew.

Interesting place to visit, but it's hard to beat nostalgia.

Comments on my own posts:

Comment and Link Roundup: April 12, 2021

[arguably cw: apocalypse, poverty] Shining a light on the availability of energy efficiency [three comments, not counting the postscripts]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by ms-demeanor) Discord is going downhill, like so many instant-messengers before it.

[cw: death, apocalypse] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by contrarianarchon) The inherent value of life.

[cw: apocalypse, drugs, (arguably) discourse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by rustingbridges; partially in response to cthulhubert and alarajrogers) Gold and disaster-hedging. [four comments]

[cw: amnesia, (fairly mild) death] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by the fittingly-named existentialterror) qntm's fiction is very good at being the kind of thing that it is, and that is the best that can be said about it. (Read his time-travel meta, though.)

[arguably cw: amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by eightyonekilograms) Audio-processing while exercising.

[Blogspot; Wayback] (OP by Michael Mock) Unpacking the references in tea names.

[cw: scrupulosity] [AO3; Wayback] (OP by cthulhuraejepsen) A possible ending to A Common Sense Guide to Doing the Most Good.

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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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Me, running my copy of Winter of Fire through a homemade scanner rig: "Hey, childhood selves! Remember that time you tried to make a digital copy of this book by hand-transcribing it into OpenOffice (and it was a massive project and you were never able to complete it)? Check out this present I got you! The future is pretty sweet sometimes."

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(I hadn't even absorbed touch-typing yet! I had to keep looking back and forth between the page and the keyboard! I'm proud of my past selves for making it as far as they did, really.

(That being said, I do think there's a valuable lesson here about the power of automation. Even now, with a vastly increased ability to *obtain* automation methods I find out about, I still tend to default to the obvious-but-tedious methods of doing things without first checking if there's a better way.))

Comments on my own posts:

Ask me about my special interests [six comments, two of which are new]

Blog formatting skills [three comments, two of which are new]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by rustingbridges) How to keep Firefox browsing history indefinitely.

[WordPress; Wayback] (OP by theredsheep) WordPress posts are harder to take back than you might think.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by baption0 of Reddit) How many "chuggas" are you supposed to say before "choo choo"?

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by contrarianarchon) Automated receipt transcription.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by rustingbridges) Problems with reCAPTCHA. [four comments, two of which are new]

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Links:

[CNET; Wayback] (by Jackson Ryan; h/t ilzo-misc) Living radiation-shielding.

[cw: violence, arson, death] [Bloomberg; Wayback] (by Jeff Maysh; h/t Matt Levine) The story of a Pepsi bottle-cap contest gone horribly wrong.



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

( Read more... )

Comments on my own posts:

[cw: discourse, ableism, racism] The one about name pronunciation [four comments, three of which are new]

[cw: poverty] On Universal Basic Income [two comments]

Interesting Fact Meme [four comments]

[cw: amnesia] The one about 1984 and measurement systems

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Comments on other people's posts:

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by sigmaleph) The intricacies of currency exchange. [two comments]

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by wingedcatgirl) Vibrant areas of social media, and making currently dormant areas more vibrant.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by paxamericana; in response to Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal) Subscription audits and self-awareness.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by contrarianarchon) Cultural osmosis; finding new things to read.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by contrarianarchon) Books we were not ready for, and possibly will never be ready for.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by staff) Automattic (the WordPress people) are taking Tumblr off of Oath's hands, which ties the fates of Tumblr and WordPress a little closer together than I'd like.

[cw: food] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by wolffyluna) Having lots of freezer space is good.

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Links:

[Uncanny Magazine; Wayback] (by Sarah Pinsker, which is apparently *not* a pseudonymic conceit but the author's longstanding name; I only just realised this now) I'd been hearing praise for "that Hugo nominee where there's a murder at a convention of alternate-universe selves" and was a bit curious, but hadn't realised it was freely available. For those of you in the same boat, here it is. (I read it and enjoyed it.)

[TASTE; Wayback] (by Mari Uyehara) Different brands of kosher salt have significantly different densities: exercise caution when following recipes that don't specify which brand of kosher salt they were normed on. (I wonder what Windsor's density is: this article is aimed at Americans and doesn't say. *googles* Well, here's a chart from Windsor comparing the density of its kosher salt to that of table salt, from which the density relative to other kosher salts can presumably be deduced.)

Comments on my own posts:

[OP is NSFW and a bit discourse-y, but this comment thread is not] Horizons

The one about asynchronous communication and Australians

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: discussion of anxiety] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by overlordtulip) Helplessness vs responsibility.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by aeiously; in response to sigmaleph) Case-sensitive handwriting.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by wolffyluna) Yay geology-blogging!

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by wolffyluna) ""Disgusting"" sedimentary rocks. [two comments]

[cw: bugs (no pictures)] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by itsbenedict) Long sleeves/pants: like a weighted blanket, but all the time.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by senator-mon-mothma; in response to maryellencarter) Circadian rhythms in an interplanetary setting.

[cw: food] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by contrarianarchon) Fake followers for hire. [two comments]

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by thedarlingone) Was about gaming serial-monogamy, has topic-drifted into gender and presentation. [three comments, one of which is new]

[cw: nsfw text] [Medium; Wayback] (OP by Ozy Brennan) Children's sexual development. (Apparently the way the Medium commenting system works is that every comment is its own post, visible from and linking back to the OP. I'm glad they recognise the importance of replies-via-reblog.)

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Links:

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (by wolffyluna) The "shitty first drafts" paradigm, and how it sometimes does more harm than good.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (by chapmangamo) A comic depicting various languages' equivalent idioms to "when pigs fly". For more, see this Wikipedia link. My favourite is "on St. Never's Day".

[Tumblr; Wayback] (by koryos) "[L]et me explain the digestive system of the vampire bat. I guarantee by the end you will be wondering how these creatures even exist."

[cw: nsfw text] [Daily Dot; Wayback] (by Ana Valens; h/t soveryverytired) Today in sites that can't be trusted to let people like me talk about sex without cracking down on them: Patreon. (although given how Patreon is even more dependant than most sites on sucking up to payment processors, I'm kind of surprised it took this long)

Laugh rule:
[cw: murder] [Twitter; Wayback] (by AlexBlechman; h/t no_man_fathomed) The most dangerous game.