Month: August 2016

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

wirehead-wannabe:

marcusseldon:

(Note: I may be projecting a little here, but I think it is getting at something true)

Inspired by this conversation, though possibly tangential to it.

I feel like one major point of misunderstanding between (personally good and also politically liberal) people* who push back against social justice, and social justice-types themselves, has to do with differences in their experiences due to the context in which these people live. They are responding to different life experiences. 

Keep reading

Endorsed

Tags:

#yessss #yes this #this is what I’ve been saying too #this is my *home* #born and raised #and it fucks you up to grow up somewhere being told that nobody grows up there #(and a lot of people claiming you can’t even *move* there) #(it’s nothing more than a sanctuary where people stop to rest for a bit between) #(going to and from the Real World™) #(things that are a relief to visitors seeking sanctuary get very grating with a lifetime’s experience) #(and a place can’t be hospitable to its residents if it denies *having* residents) #((the idea that everyone in a given place is first-generation is self-fulfilling)) #((if it means nobody can stand living there for longer than one generation)) #nobody could come up with a better idea so it looks like the category tag’s going to be #our roads may be golden or broken or lost

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

Rules: Tag 10 people you wanna know better.

I was tagged by @cakehorse

Favorite Fandom: I…actually haven’t been all that active in fandom lately. I guess I could go with Star Trek?

Languages I Speak: I speak English. I can read okay Packaging French, but don’t expect me to write it, let alone do anything with spoken French.

Favourite Film Of 2015: Not all that into movies. Especially not into watching in theatres, which are too loud and don’t let you pause and have sunk costs (since you pay by the movie, that places pressure on you not to leave partway through if it’s boring).

I will say The Force Awakens, on the grounds that it is a movie that I have watched and that I know to be from 2015. I watched it for cultural literacy reasons and do not really have an opinion on how good it was (”favourite” or otherwise), but it is definitely a film from 2015 (or so IMDB tells me, anyway).

Last Article I Read:  Um…*presses “undo close tab” repeatedly* *runs out of tab archive*

Oh, wait, “show all history” and then looking at the recent stuff would be better.

Right, it was “One Player’s Nine-Year Journey to Open a Locked, Secret Door”.

Shuffle Your Song Library And Put The First Three Titles:

“Moonlight (A Vampire’s Dream)” – Stevie Nicks

“Don’t Stop” – Fleetwood Mac

“Vienna” – Billy Joel

Last Thing I Bought Online: I bought a 64GB microSD card and a 4-pack of Aero chocolate bars from Amazon. Well, I say “I” bought them: my brother wanted them, but I had a lot of Amazon credit lying around and he didn’t, so I bought them and he paid me back. (He could have paid for them himself, but no sense leaving that money tied up in Amazon when it could be in my bank account*. I can always pay Amazon with bank money if I find something I want later.)

(Because the microSD card was just under the free shipping cut-off, it was actually cheaper to buy the chocolate bars than to not buy them, which is why he got them.)

*Well, in general. In that specific case, the money my brother gave me never saw my bank account: I used it to pay my exam invigilator.

Last Person I Dreamed Of: Does it have to be a real person? I dreamt of the Red Panda a couple days ago.

Any Recurring Dreams: Not by the strict definition: nothing identical or nearly-identical, no continuing storylines. As for recurring themes, I get a relatively large number of amnesia nightmares. (Occasionally they even go meta, with lucid nightmares where the horror comes from knowing your long-term memory compiler is turned off while you’re asleep.)

Phobias Or Fears: Food poisoning, death (and partial death, as above)

How Would My Friends Describe Me: Has an interesting perspective on things. (Interesting in the genuine and positive sense, not the “…interesting” one might use to describe something one doesn’t want to admit was dull or disturbing.)

How Would My Enemies Describe Me: Whatever their favourite euphemism is for “insubordinate”. A lot of negative descriptors for use on people boil down to “insubordinate”.

(I try to keep my insubordination to a minimum, but sometimes I slip up or misjudge exactly which hierarchy is in play.)

Would I Take A Bullet For Someone: Probably not. I guess if the bullet would be fatal to them and non-fatal to me, but that’s probably not what the question meant.

If I Had Money To Spare What Would I Buy First: (I assume this is after taking care of the usual windfall stuff, paying off household debts and charity and whatnot)

Maybe a car? Our minivan has terrible gas mileage, and we only make use of the superior storage space (for items or passengers) ~4 times/year. I’d keep the minivan around for those 4 times and buy a more efficient car for everyday use. (Mom’s afraid a non-minivan won’t have enough legroom, but surely there must be some car out there with both legroom and decent fuel efficiency.)

Tags (no obligation to do this, obviously!): @ilzolende (my newest follower), @ellaenchanting, @orbispelagium, @justice-turtle, @lizardywizard

Tags:

#I tweaked some of the questions #just for consistency in capitalisation and first- vs second-person #(yes I know I didn’t fix the shuffle one) #(couldn’t think of a way to do it that wouldn’t involve major restructuring) #(was not willing to do major restructuring) #meme #oh look an original post #(more or less)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

unpretty:

as a kid i always thought gotham was in michigan because i thought it was a midwestern city like chicago, and there was always shit going down at the pier or in abandoned factories and if michigan has anything it’s a lot of piers and abandoned factories. anyway turns out it’s probably in jersey.

 

unpretty:

other good reasons for gotham to be in michigan:

  • one of the most heavily forested states in the country with 20 million acres of forests oh my god poison ivy would be so powerful the second she got outside city limits fuck
Gotham Location 1
  • there’s 20 million acres of this and she’s got plant powers no wonder they want her on lockdown
  • there are more than 6,000 shipwrecks in the great lakes how many supervillain origin stories is that good for
  • there’s a whole class of freighter just for the great lakes
  • “63 commercial ports handled 173 million tons of cargo in 2006″ aka holy shit that is a lot of opportunities for boatcrimes
  • mr freeze has a pretty tragic origin story but if you had to put up with michigan winters and then some motherfucker showed up freezing the town outside of freezing season you would have no mercy
Gotham Location 2
  • MOTHERFUCKER I JUST PUT MY SNOWBLOWER IN STORAGE DO I LOOK LIKE I NEED THIS SHIT RIGHT NOW
  • imagine batman giving someone directions by pointing to his hand
  • “we believe killer croc is somewhere around here” he says pointing to the tip of his thumb
  • good fucking luck finding stats on abandoned buildings in michigan but holy shit are there a lot of them, no wonder they’re always having fights in abandoned factories and empty warehouses
Gotham Location 3
Gotham Location 4
  • “kitty why are you including that map of the railroads like it’s relevant” because when you’re trying to sleep and you hear a train in the distance it’s fucking spooky okay
  • i have no evidence that traincrime is an issue for batman i’m just saying the ambiance is there
  • michigan has plenty of abandoned theme parks for the joker to hijack
  • our most famous abandoned theme park is dinosaur themed so I GUESS WE KNOW WHERE HE GOT THE T-REX
Gotham Location 5
  • we have a special kind of ice cream called superman ice cream and i think bruce would be really bitter about it and that’s hilarious
  • there are nine different species of bat in michigan and they have all lived in my kitchen at some point
  • michigan is full of mines both abandoned and active and bats love them
  • put an abandoned train station next to and abandoned mine and you have a totally plausible CRIMEZONE
Gotham Location 6
  • and none of this is getting into the most compelling evidence
  • put a city in michigan and watch how fast no one gives a fuck
  • gotham, MI needs batman because who the fuck else is going to help
  • batman please save us from the cops and the state government

 

beezelbubbles:

I always thought that Gotham was Chicago and Metropolis was New York City.

 

unpretty:

that’s what i thought but apparently metropolis is new york during the day and gotham is new york at night which means the dc universe has three new yorks which i think even new yorkers can agree is too many

here are some more michigan batman facts:

  • we already have evil clowns
  • when i was a kid i used to slide down the slopes made by snowplows on my stomach which i feel is relevant to the penguin
  • there’s always a ton of cars from the 30s driving around gotham which makes perfect sense if it’s in michigan because that’s when we made cars and we’re not over it
  • rick snyder and his emergency managers are basically supervillains and i want batman to punch them
  • michigan is closer to kansas which means bruce can visit clark’s parents and then they’re emailing clark about what a nice young man he is and there’s nothing clark can do about it
  • batman vs superman: the deep dish debate
  • “who would name a city bludhaven” well we’ve already got bad axe and colon and gaylord and climax and grim and hell and frankenlust and gore and that’s just the first half of the alphabet
  • if someone said that a city in michigan had been hijacked by an evil clown that was only stopped when a man in an animal costume kicked him in the face would you even blink
  • this is meadow brook hall in rochester mi
Gotham Location 7
  • this is the charles t fisher house
Gotham Location 8
  • here’s the james scott residence
Gotham Location 9
  • welcome to michigan hope u like houses with turrets and fucked up clowns and evil men poisoning the water

 

silvainshadows:

Headcanon accepted, Gotham is definitely in Michigan. (Doesn’t Gotham have docks in at least one canon- one of the cartoons, I think? So it must be somewhere on the lake…)

 

plain-dealing-villain:

When Gotham has a location and it’s not replacing NYC, it’s either Chicago or New Jersey. But Detroit would be fine too.

Tags:

#Batman #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

vortex-atom:

explodingbat:

astronauticalaspirations:

good-and-colorful:

scienceisbeauty:

Today ten years ago an IAU resolution stated an official definition for the term “planet” who ultimately excluded Pluto as a planet of our Solar System, and reclassified it as “dwarf planet”.

Image via NASA: What Is Pluto?
Caption: The New Horizons spacecraft helped us see Pluto and its largest moon Charon more clearly than we could see them with telescopes.

A Euler diagram showing the relationship between objects in the Solar System (excluding stars) – Wikimedia Commons

Diagram of Planet and Planet-like Categories

Centaurs?

Centaurs

huh, so what we were taught in school were actually Euler diagrams, but *called* Venn diagrams for some reason

Yeah, technically a Venn diagram shows all possible intersections. The ones that are empty are sometimes shaded black, but they’re there regardless. Silly wikipedia image showing Venns morphing into Eulers:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Syllogism-Set-Diagrams.svg

Tags:

#anniversaries #(apparently this was on the 24th) #Pluto #today I was reading about the outer solar system in my astronomy textbook #2014 edition #there was a remnant Pluto section in the ”outer planets” section basically explaining #why Pluto was no longer considered a planet and would be described in more detail in the ”other solar system bodies” chapter #it referred to the New Horizons fly-by in the future tense #there were no pictures #because nobody had ever seen what Pluto looked like #(the educational video next on my to-do list tomorrow was made in 2006) #(I think I already caught them re-dubbing a previous section involving Pluto) #(the picture showed nine planets orbiting the sun) #(while the voiceover) #(which–while the same narrator as the rest of the series–didn’t sound like it was quite of a piece with the rest of the narration) #(talked about eight planets and oh yeah there’s a dwarf planet in here too) #((I’m *probably* overstating that last bit but anyway)) #adventures in University Land

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

10oclockdot:

My contribution to the internet’s go-for-broke project of converting all philosophy into Trolley Problem Memes.

(BTW, the official Facebook page is in the process of posting some of these: here’s Ship of Theseus, Buridan’s Ass, Sorites, China Brain, plus more to come…)

(Extra info on what I was going for in the Newcomb, Simone Weil (click “Didn’t Get the Joke?”), “Innocent Murder”, and Smullyan problems. The rest can be easily Googled.)

Tags:

#trolley problem meme #death tw #long post

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

vessel-haver:

cyborgbutterflies:

buzzfeeds:

every time i share a bed w someone i realise that this is what married life is gonna be like and suddenly im happy with staying single for the rest of my life

There’s actually some important differences. Sharing a bed with a spouse often involves a lot more cuddling and also sex with someone you are comfortable with and love.

Like, I am happily married and enjoy sharing the bed (though it is problematic in some ways, it not being enjoyable is not one of them, despite the bed being small). I enjoy it entirely because I like the person I am sharing it with. It doesn’t make much sense to compare sharing the bed with a stranger to that, since strangers tend to make people a lot more uncomfortable than spouses do.

Who you do the thing with makes almost all of the difference.

I would guess that married couples also don’t have to scrupulously avoid physical contact while sleeping? Also two of my relatives just put two beds right next to each other.

…wait, who said anything about strangers and scrupulous avoidance of physical contact? When I was nodding along with OP, I was thinking of sharing a bed with my parents and later my brother. (Especially my parents, because I was in the middle between them, which meant no matter which way I turned I had somebody’s breath or sweat in my face.) Nightlights that were too bright, body heat that was too warm, people waking each other up on their way to the bathroom, and the snoring. Oh god, the snoring. We can’t stay in a one-room hotel because I can’t sleep in the same room as my mother, let alone the same bed. Even to this day, when I am down the hall with a humidifier/white-noise-machine running, occasionally she’s still too loud.

(Did you know it’s possible to routinely take less than two hours to get to sleep? Ten-year-old me did not know that. (Ten-year-old me actually fought sleeping separately, because better the devil you know.) AFAICT, kid!me’s insomnia was not an internal issue, but entirely due to ill-suited sleeping environment.)

…yeah, I really like sleeping alone.

Tags:

#yes I have tried earplugs on those fortunately-now-rare occasions when I must share a bedroom with my mother #turns out earplugs give me nightmares #specifically false-awakening nightmares in which I remove the earplugs and find my ears are still clogged #(given that I was prone to clogged ears as a kid) #(and was always scared that one day I might get them in both ears simultaneously and be nearly deaf for ~3 weeks) #(*and* ear clogs *were* often triggered by plugging my ears) #(I suppose it’s really not surprising that my subconscious takes earplugs badly) #reply via reblog

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

support:

Small change to settings: Starting today, the default setting for Tumblrs will let anyone reply to your posts. Previously, it was “only people you follow and people who follow you for a week.”

If you’ve ever changed your reply preferences, what you have now will stay that way. If you’re not sure what your preferences are, you can check them in the app (account tab > settings > replies) or on the web.

Tags:

#PSA #Tumblr: a User’s Guide

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

dagny-hashtaggart:

Wait, Tim LaHaye has been dead for nearly a month and I only heard about it now? Man, me circa 2010 is staring disapprovingly down his nose at me right now. He might even have adjusted his glasses downward to stare over them at me.

(LaHaye was a major leader in right-wing evangelical Christianity, and a prominent voice in premillennial dispensationalist eschatology, probably best known these days as one of the co-authors of the Left Behind series.)

Tags:

#…holy shit #*my* circa-2010 self is giving me a Look too #Tim LaHaye #death tw #Left Behind