Brinens and Things

Comments on my own posts:

[arguably cw: ableism] The one about the term "hyperfixation" [two comments]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: corporate bullshit] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by prokopetz) Suspiciously polished websites shilling for fellow suspiciously polished things. (Update: Dad and I (and maybe Brother) are going to give a cloud-free RoboVac to Mom as a joint gift on the first night of Hanukkah.)

[cw: food, unsanitary] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by sojournthemoon, a fictional character whose author is luminousalicorn) Obstructed melioration: not just for Amentans. [two comments, sort of]

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Links:

[mild cw: apocalypse] [The Prepared; Wayback] (by Josh Centers) Ever wanted to email people over a radio transceiver? (Since you're reading *my* blog, I'm guessing you probably have.) Turns out it's possible! Takes hundreds of dollars of equipment, a ham license, a pain-in-the-ass setup process, and an agreement not to use encryption of any kind when communicating this way, but if you're sufficiently determined it *can* be done!

(Am *I* sufficiently determined? Not at the moment. A future me with less on her plate might be, though, if a better method hasn't come along by then.)



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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Had to postpone last week's backups because my laptop had enough on its plate, so here is a somewhat larger roundup.


Comments on my own posts:

[none this time]

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Comments on other people's posts:

(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 icarian-arts) Today in "memes that came to people in visions": accidental tips on phone customisation.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by femmenietzsche) The social acceptability of the word "bitch".

[Dreamwidth; Wayback crawling forbidden OP apparently later turned crawlability on] (OP by yvannairie) The complicatedness of musical taste. [three comments]

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by yvannairie) Pokemon Go identity logistics.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by thisismycursed3rdblog; addressing itsmaledict (Halloween alt of itsbenedict)) Just how many twists can we put into enemies-to-friends-to-lovers?

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Links:

[FiveThirtyEight; Wayback] (by Ben Casselman; h/t Scott Alexander) As a 25-year-old part-time student in a certificate program at a school that prides itself on its *high* acceptance rate and who has never lived on-campus, I really feel this article.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (by doctorbeth) Adorable stuffed-animal clothing.

[mild cw: war] [Tumblr; Wayback] (by the-battle-lesbian; h/t consumptive-sphinx) Shaun Keenan does some excellent art of dinosaurs in (relatively) modern contexts.

[BBC News; Wayback] (can't find a byline; h/t Matt Levine) The best roundabouts in the United Kingdom.

[cw: abuse] [The Outline; Wayback] (by Joanna Mang; h/t Scott Alexander) I remember Shakesville, though I was never a regular reader: it was too intense for even 2011!me to handle. (And I say this as someone who was once among the top 5 most prolific commenters on Ana Mardoll's Ramblings.) I disagree with Scott's assessment, though: to the extent that Shakesville strikes me as less terrifying than it did before, it is only because I have since met people whose goodwill is not conditional on staying in the good graces of Shakesville's ilk.

[Raph's Website; Wayback] (by Raph Koster) A postmortem of the MMO Star Wars: Galaxies. I never played it and am not sure I've even heard of it before, but the series is interesting nonetheless.

(although why one would deliberately create a world in which everything decays I do not know; decay is the worst part of the real world and I for one would rather not have it in my escapism, especially not in such a...well, *inescapable* manner)

Laugh rule:
[Sputnikmusic; Wayback] (by SowingSeason)

traits not necessarily suitable for a band that regularly references animals and shouts hey! an average of nine time per song.

(I finally got around to listening to this 2015 album recently. Very solid album, only a couple of duds. (Whereas with My Head Is an Animal I only liked about the first half.) My favourite was "We Sink", because I am predictable and also it is pretty.)


Bonus: a few selections from my recent bookmark-tidying.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (by deird1) The Vegemite Effect. (A memory: "This food tastes of lies," I say, waving around a piece of food from the Chinese buffet when I'd been *told* we were going to a steakhouse.)

[Tumblr; Wayback] (by thatsnotwatyourmomsaid) Hello, you must have found my camera!

[WordPress; Wayback] (by Chris Witham) Welcoming new zombies to the collective.

[K.B. Owen Mysteries; Wayback] (by James Thurber) Viewing Macbeth through the lens of murder mysteries.

Laugh rule:
[Bandcamp; Wayback (while for *best* results you'll need the audio, Wayback *will* at least get you the lyrics)] (by Brooke Abbey) Let me tell you the story, as sad as it's true...

Comments on my own posts:

The first part of the Runescape liveblogging [three comments]

The one about Ed Sheeran

The one about accumulating software prerequisites

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Comments on other people's posts:

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by tilthat; in response to sophus-b) The Pope Rap continues to be great.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by inu-fiction; in response to maryellencarter) Consider Wordpress for image hosting. (Though since my new DW images are sharing storage space with my Tumblr backup, I *am* worried I'm going to run out of media-storage space on my account, after 7+ years of Tumbling. I've mentioned in Tumblr tags a couple times that I'm a lot more reluctant to reblog posts with images now, proportionately to how many images and how many frames they have: I have to think about whether it's worth the space.)

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by rustingbridges) Did you know they make shaker bottles of finely ground salt, the better to stick to popcorn kernels?

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by gasmaskaesthetic) Have you ever set yourself on fire for fun? (No.)

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by sophus) I inspired somebody else to start making sure the Internet Archive had copies of all their links! (And Sophus uses the laugh rule, too, so that's *two* blogging practices they got from me! I love being a positive influence.)

(For those of you who don't know, I invented the laugh rule. (Quite possibly other people in other places have invented it independently, but from the timeline of events† I strongly suspect that every laugh-rule-using rationalist can trace it back to me.) It's been very gratifying to see other people picking it up, to see the positive impact I've had on the community, to know I've inspired people to make the world a bit more joyful.)

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by ilzolende; in response to contrarianarchon) Approaches to browser tab management. [three comments]

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by nuclearspaceheater; in response to rustingbridges) Left vs right shift keys, long-ago typos, and different approaches social-media websites can take. [three comments, two of which are new]

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by redbeardace; in response to rustingbridges) The first-degree-ask bug remains unfixed and poorly documented; also, reblogs without commentary don't use up the bugginess. [two comments, one of which is new]

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by feotakahari; in response to archonofquandaries) There is a time and a place for reading hot political takes, and it is *not* while looking for porn. [two comments, one of which is new]

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by contrarianarchon) Dreamwidth and angle brackets, it turns out, do not mix.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by contrarianarchon) Bloxp is glitchy, but sometimes useful (at least in theory). [two comments]

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by moral-autism; in response to serinemolecule and theopjones) The relative usefulness of laptops and smartphones in different situations. [five comments, four of which are new]

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by voxette-vk) How to operate a doorknob with no hands.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (in response to agapi42) Lying about your age for fun and profit. (If by profit, you mean chocolate.)

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by contrarianarchon) Wife-husband team Ursula Vernon and Kevin Sonney make some very nice podcasts.

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Links:

[Uncanny Magazine; Wayback] (by Vina Jie-Min Prasad; h/t flakesesomlys) A mostly-fluffy short story about a sapient robot getting into fandom.

[Atlantic; Wayback] (by Ed Yong) Appetite suppressants originally intended for humans might also work on Aedes aegypti?

Highlighted comment:
sophus uses music jargon to explain why Ed Sheeran sounds so different in different songs.

Laugh rule:
youzicha shares a Reddit thread about people who may or may not be Eliezer Yudkowsky.

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†Back when I was the only person I knew of who did it, multiple rationalists cited it as a thing they particularly liked about my blog.