Brinens and Things

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.)

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:

[fairly mild cw: corporate bullshit] The awkward transitional period of history we are currently living through

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: food] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by mindstalk) Dragonfruit reviews.

[Reddit; Wayback] (OP by /u/purakau) How to access the ArchiveTeam scrape of Tumblr.

[arguably cw: discourse, depression] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by transgenderer; partly in response to sigmaleph and maryellencarter) Do subtitles interfere with grasping the visual elements of a show? It's complicated. [two comments]

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Links:

[cw: heights] [CTV News] Whee!



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

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(previous post)


God knows how I managed to get zimmer working on my previous computer, but I can't seem to replicate that success here. Fuck it: I'll just use wget. The resulting files are more broadly compatible anyway, 7-zip is very good at compressing collections of HTML files down, and I haven't been personally compiling any wikis for which the ability to use the results without first decompressing them is important. The reject flags will need some tuning, but I can handle that.

(Also I'm going to switch these from monthly to quarterly: I don't think I really need them to follow the live versions *that* closely, and I suspect wget is going to be even more time-consuming than the ~20 - 30 minutes/wiki that zimmer was. Yeah, it's just compute/bandwidth time and not active-monitoring time, but as I write this part of the draft I'm waiting for a one-off (or maybe annual) game-guide wiki scrape to complete so I can boot over to Windows and finish installing the Windows stuff.)

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The tumblr-utils cron job quietly failed, apparently because Ubuntu 20.04 is moving away from Python 2. Installed the python2 package and replaced all instances of "python" in the command with "python2": manual invocation seems to be working now, and we'll see how the cron job goes.

[a couple days later]

Yep, that seems to be ticking along just fine.

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(I just *heard* WinFF complete the latest batch of lifelogger files by the way the fan slowed way down. An advantage to only having four threads (and thus having WinFF take up a larger proportion of [the CPU usage the laptop is designed to withstand]), perhaps. Even when it's running, though, this fan *is* significantly quieter.)

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My list of which programs to install on a new computer is much more thorough now: it was a good start, but I found some things I'd overlooked. It's been helpful to be able to look at my previous computer and see how things are set up there, but one doesn't always get that opportunity when migrating and I'd like that to affect things as little as possible.

(For that matter, I plan for the list to eventually contain not just notes of which programs to seek out but, where feasible, *the programs themselves*. Clouds are useful, but I don't like to be dependent on them.)

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The food-diary file takes much less time to save on this computer. The file is stored on the HDD, too, so it's not an SSD-vs-HDD thing (at least not when it comes to the file itself; I think the LibreOffice *software* is on the SSD).

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Migrating Thunderbird to a new computer by sticking the old ".thunderbird" folder into the new home directory continues to Just Work. It doesn't even need to be a fully up-to-date copy as long as you're using a synchronise-with-server setup (rather than a download-and-delete setup†): it will catch up automatically.

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Not migration-related, but: apparently GNOME SoundConverter *does* have a 64kbps setting. I think I was thinking of 32kbps, which I was using back at the start of my lifelogging.

WinFF can't handle my podcast files for some reason: rather than the usual progress display, it talks about "frames" as if I'd handed it a video or something, and it never seems to make any progress no matter how many frames it goes through. I think I'll just stick with my current methods.

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The command-line replaygain software I was using doesn't seem to be in Synaptic anymore. Apparently music player Quod Libet has a replaygain function, as well as a metadata editor and podcatcher. I didn't like its podcatcher setup (too much clutter of old episodes, and I don't think there was an option for "check for new episodes only when I say so"), but the rest of it might replace the stuff I was previously using for those things. I'd been having trouble with my previous replaygain not seeming to react to the reference-loudness flag, so perhaps this is for the best.

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Turns out the biggest storage-drives-with-USB-interfaces-installed we have lying around are 80 GB (also 17 years old, and therefore probably not very trustworthy even *if* 80 GB sufficed). I thought we had a 500 or two, but maybe not.

Dad mentioned something about "Mom's old computer", and I realised that was a good point. Once the hermit-crab shuffle completes I'll try using the TV's prosthetic brain as a backup drive, at least in the interim until I can get something more dedicated.

(I'll have to encrypt them, of course: there's no question of whether to rely on the "token authentication" of having access to the drive if I'm putting them on an explicitly communal computer. P7Zip has an encryption option: I expect that'll do.)

(Not airgapped, admittedly, but it's something. Perhaps I'll keep them on the secondary partition, add an extra layer of remove.)

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I haven't used Scuttlebutt much, but I think I *will* go ahead and save a copy of my client data. Best to reserve the option of picking up where I left off, if I ever end up returning to it.

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†The lies-to-children way of putting this is "IMAP vs POP", but apparently both protocols allow for both setups (though with different defaults). ↩

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (by siderea)


Brin has always had a separate email address from my legal-name one, which turns out to have been a good move since [the fact that brin_bellway is owned by someone with that email address] was stolen a few months later (also because of Tumblr quietly leaving on by default the ability for people to look up your username given your email address). If you don't have a separate email address for each of your identities, the second-best time is today.

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Also, while I'm thinking about this:

I have to say, I'm actually grateful for those spammers that--offering one of your passwords as proof--claim to have hacked your webcam and taken pictures of you masturbating, and demand a blackmail payment of Bitcoin.

Because while the story was ludicrous enough to be clearly false (ah yes, you got into my email with a password that isn't my email password, took over the webcam I don't have, waited for me to consume video porn I don't watch, and took pictures of me in a state that an untrained eye wouldn't recognise as sexual: ~oh no, the horror~), that *was* a genuine password. Not my email password, not a password I used for anything *super* important, but a genuine password that at the time was still in use.

It was one of the nicest possible ways anyone could have driven home to me that I needed to finally get my act together and get a password manager. Within the week, I had one all set up, complete with every account I could find.

Comments on my own posts:

[cw: what it says on the tin (no pictures)] Recipe: Chocolate Nut Torte

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: venting] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by yvannairie) Understaffing bullshit.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by sigmaleph) What to do when a public holiday falls on a Sunday.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by little-brisk) Various ways to back up a Tumblr.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by sigmaleph) Mathematical (and other) mnemonics.

[cw: amnesia, arguably unreality] (Note: the Tumblr reverse-post-order glitch continues.) [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by reasonsmysoniscrying; in response to maryellencarter) Minor precognition, or so your brain insists.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by sigmaleph) Stratford-based news broadcasters won't tell you what Justin Bieber is famous *for*, but by God is he from Stratford.

(I've decided that tag rambles are a substantial enough contribution to be worth including.) [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by minatokun) "Accounting majors, who hurt you?"

(Note: I do not actually *endorse* the claim that people imposing [selection pressure for accounting talent] on my *ancestors* are harming *me* (though I can see why someone might argue it, and certainly it was harming *them*). Personally I've been rather enjoying having won accounting in the lottery of fascinations, *especially* because it is--by the standards of the general population--a fairly rare prize: people keep being appreciative of and impressed by my contributions, and it's nice to feel like a Valued Member of Society.)

((A little while ago I impressed *the Dean of Business* while chatting with her about US-expat-friendly investment strategies, which was quite the ego boost.))


[cw: heteronormativity, amnesia] [Dreamwidth; Wayback crawling forbidden] (OP by hebethen) Horrified screaming regarding the view of sexuality a character in "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" espouses.

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Links:

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by gdgdbaby) Secret Santa compliment meme! Here is my thread.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (by bobacupcake; h/t consumptive-sphinx) Art thieves vs Disney.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (by Carl Muckenhoupt; h/t prokopetz) I'm told that this game is not for newcomers to the genre, so perhaps I will not actually play it, but there is just something so satisfying about reciting the blurb:

Finally, here you are. At the delcot of tondam, where doshes deave. But the doshery lutt is crenned with glauds.

Glauds! How rorm it would be to pell back to the bewl and distunk them, distunk the whole delcot, let the drokes uncren them.

But you are the gostak. The gostak distims the doshes. And no glaud will vorl them from you.

(As for the experience of attempting to *understand* it, it reminds me rather of reading French. "[???] the card on your head and walk [???] [???] the table. If it doesn't fall, [lose?] $1000."

(When we salvaged our bilingual version of that game, the English and French decks had gotten all jumbled together, and rather than sift them out we just went "what the hell, it'll be educational" and played with a shuffled English/French deck.))


Laugh rule:
[cw: unsanitary, violence] [Rock Paper Shotgun; Wayback] (by Nate Crowley)
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(I think I'm going to have to keep an eye on this guy.)

(previously on)

[cut for length]

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It could easily be a coincidence, but I do wonder if it says something about, like, the slower pace of Dreamwidth and its embrace of asynchronous communication, that I meet so many Australians on here.

(who cares if we have opposite schedules, we'll just have conversations in which responses are spaced twelve hours apart, it's not like this is Discord)

On Tumblr you hear jokes like "you know you're up late when you start seeing Australians"†, but here the process is more "*wakes up, goes downstairs, turns on laptop* ah, time to see what the Australians have been up to today".

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†I would like to point out that I *do* read my entire Tumblr dash, in chronological order, but there does seem to be a common assumption on Tumblr that people don't do that.