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:

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]
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[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]
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[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).

Comments on my own posts:

[none this time]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[arguably cw: nsfw text] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by tototavros) Aspects and histories of hypno-kink.

[cw: nsfw text] [AO3; Wayback] (OP by Huitzil) Have I mentioned lately how great The Hentai World of Eilverra is? I'm not even personally into almost any of the sex involved, but the humour and worldbuilding are well worth it on their own.

[cw: apocalypse, (fairly mild) poverty] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by grayestofghosts) Resilient, sovereign computing (comms, information storage/search, crunching, etc) is important across almost any situation, not *just* in apocalypses and not *just* in the Global South. [two comments]

[cw: amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by k-vichan, though not exactly in response to anyone in particular) How to prepare for fanfiction.net's inevitable demise.

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Links:

[MarineTraffic] The bright side of that whole incident with the Ever Given is learning about this neat live map of ships. I did not know you could just...*do* that.

[Nature; Wayback] (by Jessica Morrison) Mantis shrimp likely see *fewer* colours than humans do, not more: their extra colour receptors are for making them *faster* at determining what colour something is. (On the other hand, these are presumably *humans* *telling* us this...)

[arguably cw: apocalypse] [Giving Green; Wayback] Giving Green applies effective-altruism principles to analyse charities fighting climate change, finding the places where money goes furthest. (Note: if you're a Canadian taxpayer (or a Canadian tax-filer who might owe within the next five years) who wants to donate to the Clean Air Task Force, check out RC Forward. They can help you get money more efficiently to some other generally-EA charities too.)

[F-Droid (or Google Play); Wayback] KDE Connect lets you connect your Linux (or *maybe* Windows or Mac) computer and your Android phone. You can receive SMS notifications on your laptop, use your phone touchscreen as a trackpad, and more!

[GitLab; Wayback] (by W1nst0n) Ever wanted to get rid of apps the phone manufacturer or carrier insisted on installing on *your* phone? Don't have the know-how or courage to hack into the firmware and rip them out by the roots? (can't say I blame you: I fucked up the cellular modem on a device attempting to do that sort of thing) Just want to know more about what all the system apps actually *do*?

Universal Android Debloater is a non-invasive built-in-app-removal method. Strictly speaking, it doesn't actually *remove* the apps per se: rather, it seals them off so that they can't run (they also stop showing up in the app drawer). It can unseal any or all of them again upon request, and if all else fails, nothing the script does to the phone runs deep enough to survive a factory reset. The app lists come with documentation describing what every built-in app on every known-to-W1nst0n device does, to help you decide which apps you want to seal off.

Laugh rule:
[Bloomberg; Wayback crawling forbidden] (by Matt Levine, though the part quoted is by Tom Neill)

I thought it would be fun to be the first meme website to sell itself as an NFT. Also to be completely honest, I thought it might make it into Matt Levine’s Money Stuff. Essentially, I was 'doing it for the gram'.

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

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Comments on my own posts:

[mild cw: amnesia, corporate bullshit] One year of lifelogging

[cw: venting, unsanitary, aging, (arguably) sexism] if you want something done right you have to do it yourself

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: food] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by maryellencarter) Tips on what flavourings to add to beans.

[cw: food, apocalypse] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by lydamorehouse) The practical usefulness of rotated stockpiles. [two comments]

[cw: abuse, kidnapping] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by alarajrogers) Not all magic portals lead somewhere good.

[Reddit; Wayback] (OP by /u/GoonieGangGeneral; in response to /u/ForbiddenText) Geometric Weather is a great weather app, once you know how to handle its quirks.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by ms-demeanor) How to make a smart TV without the corporate bullshit.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by tototavros) Advice on effective alarm clocks.

[cw: murder, amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by chongoblog; in response to maryellencarter) BBC Sherlock got pretty batshit in its later seasons.

[cw: heterosexism, cissexism] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by yvannairie) Queer people and oversharing (or possibly ""oversharing"").

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Links:

[Hackaday; Wayback] (by Lewin Day) A car transmission modelled in Lego.

[Commute Time Map] (by Geoapify) A map that shows which parts of your area you can reach within a given timeframe, using a given means of transportation.



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

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Comments on my own posts:

Doing the hermit-crab shuffle [three comments, not counting the postscript]

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

Blog formatting skills

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Comments on other people's posts:

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by lydamorehouse) The costs and benefits of smart-home assistants.

[mild cw: death] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by ilzolende) Blog recs.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by rustingbridges) The hostile fee structure of Paypal.

[cw: nsfw text] [AO3; Wayback] (OP by Huitzil) Hey, remember that porn-worldbuilding giftfic I got a few years ago? The author wrote a revised and expanded version! I highly recommend it, as well as the chapters that *weren't* inspired by me.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by siderea) Various ways to follow a Dreamwidth blog (in this case, siderea), and the circumstances in which one might pick one over another.

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Links:

[cw: food] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP is technically by extrajordinary, but the bulk of the thread is by petermorwood; h/t ilzo-misc) Restaurants in ancient Rome.

Two laugh-rule entries:
[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (by siderea) The Great Chain of History.

[Bulwer-Lytton; Wayback] 2019 winners of the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest, in which one attempts to write the worst opening line for a novel.

Comments on my own posts:

The one about rotated stockpiles [two comments]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by wolffyluna) Six degrees of Scientific Kevin Bacon.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by ilzolende; in response to contrarianarchon) How to back up webcomics; browser choice. [five comments, two of which are new]

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Links:

[GQ; Wayback] (by Josh Dean) The story of a particularly clever bank heist.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (by muge_niu; h/t ilzo-misc) AO3 has been banned by the Great Firewall of China. (official AO3 confirmation of inaccessibility, though not outright stating that it's because of censorship) I am saddened but not surprised (if anything, I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner).

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.