Month: July 2018

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

swimmer963:

My favorite thing about my accounting prof is how adorably indignant he is about some of the arbitrary conventions that come with his life’s work. Some representative quotes: 

On the topic of materiality: “So at one point someone noticed employees were taking office supplies home and made a new rule that you had to request them from the clerk. To which the correct answer is ‘screw you, stop being a goddamned clown, it’s a 50¢ post-it note, IT’S NOT MATERIAL!”

On the topic of audits: “Of course, if they *were* committing fraud, you would literally never know because they could show me whatever book with whatever coding rules they wanted. One time I DID find an error in the books and I was so excited, I ran to my supervisor to show them, and they said ‘all right, good job, now you write up why it’s immaterial.’ I’ve never been so disappointed.” 

Miscellaneous:

“Land doesn’t depreciate” 

“It’s now a lesser truck than it was” 

“Is the operating cycle more or less than a year? If they’re selling fish it’d BETTER be less” 

“You know, what made the first computers commercially viable wasn’t the Internet or anything cool like you kids do these days, it was that they could do accounting” (I have no idea if this is actually true but it was cute) 

“The quick version is that the whole thing is stupid, but I’m going to teach it anyway” 

“The statement of cash flows is a pretty pointless report but GAAP made it mandatory soooo here we go” 

>>(I have no idea if this is actually true but it was cute)<<

IIRC, it depends on what you mean by “first” computer. Like, not the *first* first computers, but in the 80’s spreadsheet software was a Very Big Deal and an important factor driving computer sales.

*goes to find some stuff on Wikipedia*

Here are the Wiki entries for two of the big spreadsheet programs of the time, VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3.

Tags:

#in which Brin is very much [a CS major about to switch to accounting] #(I originally learned the stuff above from a textbook) #I feel like the original post qualifies for the tag #I cannot believe I actually understand this #adventures in University Land #reply via reblog #unfortunately I’m too brainfoggy from a cold to study right now #I might be able to manage working on the household financial statement though #as that is somewhat more informal #illness mention #history

Solar System 10 Things: Looking Back at Pluto

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

nasa:

In July 2015, we saw Pluto up close for the first time and—after three years of intense study—the surprises keep coming. “It’s clear,” says Jeffery Moore, New Horizons’ geology team lead, “Pluto is one of the most amazing and complex objects in our solar system.”

1. An Improving View

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These are combined observations of Pluto over the course of several decades. The first frame is a digital zoom-in on Pluto as it appeared upon its discovery by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930. More frames show of Pluto as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. The final sequence zooms in to a close-up frame of Pluto taken by our New Horizons spacecraft on July 14, 2015.

2. The Heart

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Pluto’s surface sports a remarkable range of subtle colors are enhanced in this view to a rainbow of pale blues, yellows, oranges, and deep reds. Many landforms have their own distinct colors, telling a complex geological and climatological story that scientists have only just begun to decode. The image resolves details and colors on scales as small as 0.8 miles (1.3 kilometers). Zoom in on the full resolution image on a larger screen to fully appreciate the complexity of Pluto’s surface features.

3. The Smiles

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July 14, 2015: New Horizons team members Cristina Dalle Ore, Alissa Earle and Rick Binzel react to seeing the spacecraft’s last and sharpest image of Pluto before closest approach.

4. Majestic Mountains

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Just 15 minutes after its closest approach to Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft captured this near-sunset view of the rugged, icy mountains and flat ice plains extending to Pluto’s horizon. The backlighting highlights more than a dozen layers of haze in Pluto’s tenuous atmosphere. The image was taken from a distance of 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers) to Pluto; the scene is 780 miles (1,250 kilometers) wide.

5. Icy Dunes

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Found near the mountains that encircle Pluto’s Sputnik Planitia plain, newly discovered ridges appear to have formed out of particles of methane ice as small as grains of sand, arranged into dunes by wind from the nearby mountains.

6. Glacial Plains

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The vast nitrogen ice plains of Pluto’s Sputnik Planitia – the western half of Pluto’s “heart”—continue to give up secrets. Scientists processed images of Sputnik Planitia to bring out intricate, never-before-seen patterns in the surface textures of these glacial plains.

7. Colorful and Violent Charon

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High resolution images of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, show a surprisingly complex and violent history. Scientists expected Charon to be a monotonous, crater-battered world; instead, they found a landscape covered with mountains, canyons, landslides, surface-color variations and more.

8. Ice Volcanoes

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One of two potential cryovolcanoes spotted on the surface of Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft. This feature, known as Wright Mons, was informally named by the New Horizons team in honor of the Wright brothers. At about 90 miles (150 kilometers) across and 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) high, this feature is enormous. If it is in fact an ice volcano, as suspected, it would be the largest such feature discovered in the outer solar system.

9. Blue Rays

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Pluto’s receding crescent as seen by New Horizons at a distance of 120,000 miles (200,000 kilometers). Scientists believe the spectacular blue haze is a photochemical smog resulting from the action of sunlight on methane and other molecules in Pluto’s atmosphere. These hydrocarbons accumulate into small haze particles, which scatter blue sunlight—the same process that can make haze appear bluish on Earth.

10. Encore

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On Jan. 1, 2019, New Horizons will fly past a small Kuiper Belt Object named MU69 (nicknamed Ultima Thule)—a billion miles (1.5 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto and more than four billion miles (6.5 billion kilometers) from Earth. It will be the most distant encounter of an object in history—so far—and the second time New Horizons has revealed never-before-seen landscapes.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

Tags:

#ooh #I didn’t know about the Kuiper Belt Extended Mission #Pluto #space #the power of science #the more you know #long post

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

ofgeography:

fourofthem:

au where the trojan war is a party menelaus throws to win back his girlfriend who left him for some douchebag and he ropes all his friends into helping him and wacky shenanigans happen and a running gag is that odysseus doesn’t even want to be there he’s got shit to do and at the end he gets stuck in traffic on the way home

“listen, man,” homer says, “i dunno what you want me to tell you. like, i wasn’t even there.”

the cop who smells like bear claw donuts and watering hose plastic slaps his hands flat on the table, toying with the corner of something papery; maybe a folder, or a photo. the cop whose uniform swishes like lycra when he walks–and, though this is just a guess, is probably wearing knock-off ray ban pilot sunglasses that he hasn’t taken off once in his life–leans against the two-way mirror so hard that the buttons on the shoulder of his uniform click against the glass.

“kid, i admire your desire to keep your friends out of trouble,” Donut Mouth says. “but a real house really burned down. people could have died.”

“look at it from our point of view,” Ray Ban suggests. “because from our point of view, it looks like a prank war got out of control and ended in arson. you don’t want arson on your record.”

homer, who has been in this police station since three-thirty in the goddamn morning and is more hungover than he has ever been in his entire fucking life, leans back in his chair and folds his arms over his chest.

“oh, you want me to look at it from your point of view,” he drawls. “nice. real fucking nice.”

the embarrassed pause is enough for homer to gather his wits a little: if he pushes past the pounding in his head he can kind of remember how he got here. he knows that the cops were right; there was definitely a fire, and it was almost definitely the greek alpha sig’s fault, although if you really go all the way back it’s not like they were unprovoked.

he sips at the coffee they’d given him a little while ago. it’s almost cold, but it helps quiet the pounding in his brain. pancakes would have helped more, but he doesn’t think the police station have those on the menu, and even if they do, it isn’t like they’re going to be any good if the quality of their coffee is any indication.

he tries to figure out how long he’s been here, in realtime not drunk time. probably an hour at least. so–that’s one down, and they can only keep him for twenty-four, right?

yeah. he’s pretty sure. so all he has to do is make it twenty-four hours without telling them who actually started the fire but also without being, like, a hostile witness, or whatever. he doesn’t actually know that much about the law, but he remembers that one brooklyn nine nine episode where jake arrested someone too early and they had to find something to charge him with in one day

homer is fairly confident that he can’t get charged with anything he’s done lately, but he does definitely smell like weed, so.

love, justice, and homer all are blind, but none of them are stupid, so he rubs at his eyes and says, “okay. fine. i’ll tell you what i know, but like, most of this is just what i heard. it’s not gonna hold up in court. i mean, i didn’t see anything.”

“obviously,” says Ray Ban.

“what do you mean, ‘obviously’? that’s fucking ableist, man.”

“that’s not what i–”

“roy,” Donut Mouth interrupts, tone a warning. “go on, son.”

“okay,” homer says. he takes a deep breath. “so like–okay, what you have to understand is we’re deep in this war, right? i mean, this has been going on since like, the first toga party of the year, when this transfer kid, paris, hooked up with helen during rush.”

“helen …”

“spartowski.”

“and she is?”

“manny atreus’ girlfriend. or–ex-girlfriend, i guess. she’s alpha delta chi.”

“so manny atreus burned down the trojan house because … his girlfriend cheated on him in paris?”

“what? no. i never said he burned it down, i said the prank war started because his girlfriend cheated on him, and not in paris, with paris.”

“someone’s parents named them paris?”

“i don’t fucking know, man, i didn’t name him. that’s just what he’s called. maybe it’s a family name.”

“sure.”

“my dude, i’m called homer. you think i’m judging people on the weird shit their parents named them?”

Donut Mouth coughs into his hand. “fair point.”

“okay. so: manny said we had to go to war, for like, honor or something, and honestly at first it sounded kind of fun, so we just kind of went with it. but …”

he trails off. august seems like such a long time ago. a whole lifetime. maybe more than one.

“but what?”

homer’s head hurts. he’s so hungover he thinks he can smell beer in his sweat. he can definitely smell weed. it’s going to be a long, long, long day.

“i dunno,” he admits. “i guess things just got–a little out of hand.”

read more

Tags:

#fanfic #Iliad #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(Sappho’s newsletter)

~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

@sinesalvatorem, I was going to reblog your post [link], but I figure giving poverty advice in a reblog when the OP is about how one shouldn’t give poverty advice is asking for trouble (especially when OP has relatively few notes), so I’m pinging you on a fresh post instead.

—

>>On that note, if anyone who reads this has any life hacks wrt saving money or earning extra income, or knows online resources that have compiled a bunch of them, please tell me! I already know of quite a few, but I’m always looking for more.<<

Hey, look, a special interest!

(or, well, part special interest, part coping mechanism)

—

(Disclaimers: I acknowledge that for any or all of these things, you [may already do them]/[may not find them worthwhile]/[may not be able to do them at all]. If anything in the rest of this post sounds like I don’t, that’s just because it’s sometimes easier to get the words out that way.

A more specific version that I feel is particularly worth pointing out: while I have had plenty of financial difficulties and qualify as “poor” by many definitions, I have never (quite) been *broke*. Some of these tips will be stuff like “how to spend $800 in one day in order to avoid spending $1,400 over four months”, and if you never have $800 on hand at any given time feel free to ignore that (though maybe file them away for if/when you reach a point in your life where you can afford to tie up some money for a while in order to spend less in the long run).)

—

This has been kind of a recurring theme on my blog lately, but: housemates are so important. Finances are best played as a team sport: going it alone is sadly necessary in some situations, but it’s definitely Hard Mode, and being poor is hard enough as it is without adding more difficulty modifiers on top of it.

(It *is* painful to have to watch people you share finances with spend money in ways you don’t approve of, but–I remind myself at such times–it’s still completely worth it for all the bulk discounts and such you can get. (Although I’m sure there are *some* people out there somewhere who are careless enough with money that this would not be true, and obviously you don’t want to share finances with such people.))

—

People hate on Uber-type things a lot, but honestly, they really can be a lifesaver. Delivery gigs are what tipped us over into being in the black for March†. (Up ~CAD$230 over the course of that month! God, it’d been *so* long since our money had been on any kind of upward trend for any significant length of time.) Some companies in some places will also hire bicyclist or even pedestrian delivery freelancers.

—

People also hate on advice to avoid bank-related fees because sometimes when you’re poor they’re unavoidable, but it’s still worth checking that each fee really *is* unavoidable before resorting to it.

(You know why I switched from annual statements to quarterly? Because I found out while preparing the 2017 statement that my parents had gone below their minimum chequing-account balance (which incurs a CAD$11 fee for each month it happens) *eleven months* out of the year, and had been quietly shouldering it *even though the household as a whole had enough money to cover everyone’s minimum balances*: it was just disproportionately in the kids’ accounts because at the time only the kids were employed. I immediately insisted on providing my parents with an informal, indefinite loan to help them cover their balance††, and started doing more frequent statements so we can catch shit like that sooner.

(Apparently Dad was embarrassed and Mom didn’t want to ~burden~ her children when she was ~supposed~ to be providing for them. And I was like “You can use the money you’re saving in bank fees towards buying me food.”))

—

You make a remark about the restaurants in San Francisco being expensive, and of course in this part of Tumblr I hear plenty about how high the rents are. To what extent does the Bay have generally high prices across the board (or for groceries in particular: grocery prices are about to be important), and how far away do you have to get from the Bay for things to stop having that markup?

The New York trick (travel to an area with a lower cost of living, stock up on cheap groceries to bring back) is harder in a place with no nearby-ish country borders or similar clear markers of “you are now entering the Cheap Zone”, but it might still be doable there.

(I think the trick used by people who *live* in Cheap Zones is to use coupons *intended* for places with higher costs of living (with discounts sized accordingly), but which are technically valid there. Occasionally these can even be stacked: Mom almost always brings some coupons (from American websites) to New York.)

—

Target does ad-matching: if you show them that another store’s flyer has a sale on a certain food, they will sell you that food at the other store’s sale price, letting you avoid the hassle and transportation costs of running all over town chasing deals. (note that Target does not match produce) The Flipp app [link] will give you the flyers for a (U.S. or Canada) postal code of your choice.

Walmart does not do ad-matching as such (in America; Canadian Walmarts still do it), but if you scan your Walmart receipt into their app, they will issue you an e-gift card for the amount you *would* have saved if they allowed it.

There might be other stores in your particular area that do matching, but these are the only ones I found when I was looking this up in an Arizonan context recently. It seems to be less common in America than it is in Canada.

—

Running ad videos and occasionally doing other stuff through Swagbucks is a nice way to get a bit of supplemental income. I recently helped Mom write a guide to using it [link], so I will direct you there. (please use the referral links, I’d very much appreciate it)

—

If you have anything that gives you a discount on Amazon purchases and/or generates income in the form of Amazon credit (like, say, Swagbucks), bear in mind that Amazon has an ever-expanding selection of other stores’ gift cards [link] (including, notably, Safeway [link]), almost all of which can be purchased using Amazon credit.

—

There’s this one program of incentives to encourage lower electricity use during peak periods [link] that I keep getting ads for from advertisers who don’t realise I’m not Torontonian, which is only available in Toronto and parts of California (weird list, I know). Is that applicable to you, or likely to become so?

—

I haven’t done any freelance audio transcription for Rev [link] in a while, but you might be better suited to it than I am. (Maybe your picking-out-what-people-are-saying-at-crowded-parties ability would help you here?)

—

>>At one point, I even had a list of which staple items are cheaper at which stores, but homelessness means I keep moving too much for that to ever stay relevant.<<

Some grocery stores let you look up their prices online, making it easier to collect data for such lists and less painful (relatively) to keep making new ones for new places.

—

I recently systematically went through the websites of every cell company available in this area and determined the single best phone plan for getting our house phone to do everything we currently need it to do while paying as little as possible, and I am very glad I did. If we hadn’t been careful, we could easily have ended up paying twice as much or more.

Unfortunately, there is essentially zero overlap between my available cell companies and yours, so I can’t just skip you to the end result of “Public Mobile is great; Freedom Mobile *might* be even better *if* you’re planning to only use your phone in cities”: you’d have to either do the comparisons yourself or find somebody more local who’s done it.

—

Some restaurants and the occasional grocery store will give you free food on your birthday. The selection is heavily location-dependant; there are various websites listing the available things for a given place (example: https://www.favoritecandle.com/free-birthday-meals/San-Francisco/CA), though their information is often out of date and you’ll need to check with each restaurant’s own website. Most require newsletter signups (I have a dedicated email address specifically for newsletters from people who might give me free stuff); many require you to buy something else in order to receive the freebie with it, but there are a few that are outright free (except transportation costs, of course: plan your route carefully, and ideally have them be on the way to somewhere you were going anyway). Last year I got a muffin (Starbucks) and a large fruit slushie (Booster Juice): this year Starbucks has unfortunately stopped offering freebies unless you buy at least one thing from them per year (any time during the year, though, not specifically your birthday! still suitable for lots of people!), but I’ve found a couple more newsletters and am set up to get a bag of chocolate-covered almonds (Giant Tiger) and a hamburger (Harvey’s), plus another slushie. (And who knows, maybe I’ll end up at Starbucks at some point between now and November and regain muffin eligibility for this year.)

(maryellencarter, if you’re reading this, note that I’m planning to give you a pre-sifted list of these for your birthday: you don’t need to go figuring this out yourself. I’ll probably compile and send it in October sometime, so that there’ll be less time for circumstances to change while still leaving room for the restaurants to consider you to have been on their newsletter for a sufficient length of time beforehand.)

—

My finances tag, “adventures in human capitalism”, might have some other stuff that I missed or covered in less detail here.

—

†I don’t have a good picture of our finances after March yet: I’ve switched to preparing quarterly financial statements (formerly annual), but I haven’t finished collecting and processing the data from Q2, so right now it’s scattered around various bank accounts and credit-card records of four different people and I can’t see what it’s like overall.

††Honestly, I don’t really care whether they pay it back or not. Money used for things beneficial to me is mine for all practical purposes, and I’m not too concerned with whose bank account it happens to be in. (Mom expressed her gratitude at my “selflessness” recently, but I’m *really* not selfless: I’m just very aware that working together is in my own best interest. I don’t make anywhere near enough to survive alone: hell, often I can’t even contribute an equal share towards the group’s expenses, and have to find non-income ways to contribute like accounting and pest control. (I’ve gotten pretty good at killing houseflies. As long as they’re up against a window they’re easy.))

Tags:

#this post technically qualifies as: #oh look an original post #but is closer to the spirit of: #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #long post #death mention #food #home of the brave #our home and cherished land

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Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

wilwheaton:

 

moreprivilegedthanyou:

100% Accurate.

Tags:

#in what goddamn universe is *New Jersey* #land of 100F-for-weeks-on-end summers #where it can easily be Boxing Day by the time you have (just barely) enough snow to leave a footprint in #where it rarely goes much below 20F #a snow-covered moonscape #like maybe compared to fucking Georgia or something but that’s not exactly *saying* much #home of the brave #maps

~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

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deductioneers:

Amass Fuck-You Money

 

thejochiang:

Goals: amass fuckyou money

Forever reblog the mother goddess

 

brin-bellway:

(status: I acknowledge that this is psychological damage from an extended period of financial hardship during formative years, but I nonetheless mostly endorse it)

Hmm. I seem to be having a bunch of thoughts and feelings about this.

There seems to be a…maybe “divide” is too strong a word, I don’t know. But…like, I called it “fuck-you money vs fuck-me money” in a post a while back. Even when the actions are the same, there’s this psychological difference in how people can approach it.

When I see FIRE people, they always frame it in terms of *freedom*. (It’s right there in the acronym: Financially *Independent*, Retiring Early.) But to me, it strikes me as being a thing about *safety*. “Enough money that you can run your household solely off the interest from your investments” can protect you from a lot of different problems, and *that’s* why the idea appeals to me.

A few weeks ago I saw some distant acquaintance-of-an-acquaintance on Tumblr (I don’t recall who) advising a young person with a high-paying job and relatively low expenses (Silicon Valley programmer, I think, or something like that) to go on some trips and enjoy themself, because they weren’t going to have this much disposable income again until their forties if not later. And it felt like a very weird framing to me, because…the way I see it, if future-me doesn’t have money to spare, then neither do I. I don’t have spare money unless I can afford to feed myself, and I can’t truly afford to feed myself unless I can afford to feed *all* of my selves.

16-year-old me got to eat because 7-year-old me’s dad put away some ““extra””, and eventually that ““extra”” was all he had left. Where is 33-year-old me getting *her* food from?

Because if the source isn’t me, then I don’t trust it to come through for her. I want to do all I can to make sure that, no matter who is or is not willing to employ her or for how much, 33-year-old me (and 44-year-old me, and 55-year-old me…) is fed and housed and so forth.

—

(This was going to be a tag ramble, but then I thought it should probably stay with the post if somebody reblogs it to respond or something. I’m just going to leave it in tag format.)

#this post probably partly inspired by my first anniversary of non-freelance employment   #which is coming up soon   #I think I will celebrate by scheduling the dental checkup I have been putting off for ~3 years because I didn’t feel I could afford it   #(yes government healthcare does not cover dental)   #(OHIP has some very weird-looking exceptions)   #(this is probably the result of some kind of complicated political negotiation that I’m not sure I want to know the details of)   #anyway a dental checkup seems like a good compromise between celebratory and practical   #(and [practical celebrations are easier to enjoy]/[I find myself drawn to practical gifts these days anyway including gifts I buy for myself])   #((that safety thing manifests here especially))   #((the things I dream of buying these days are always things that protect you from something))   #((checkups that protect you from tooth damage and electric cars that protect you from rising oil prices and solar-powered phone chargers that protect you from power outages))   #((this I am much less sure I endorse))   #((I mean I think it is good to want practical things but it would also probably be good if I felt safe enough to want a few non-practical things too))   #(((sometimes on especially bad brain days I can’t even bring myself to play Flight Rising)))   #(((that is currently the most common cause of my FR hiatuses)))   #(((it used to be the most common cause was that I felt like playing some other game instead)))

 

maryellencarter:

This is really interesting and I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I’m still not sure I actually have the brain to word everything I’m thinking/feeling about it, but here’s one bit, at least:

“the way I see it, if future-me doesn’t have money to spare, then neither do I. I don’t have spare money unless I can afford to feed myself, and I can’t truly afford to feed myself unless I can afford to feed *all* of my selves.”

I think… there are two things I’m thinking here. One is, I don’t think I believe, subconsciously, that it’s *possible* to have enough money to feed all of my future selves. This is almost certainly trauma-based – having enough money to eat has been a recurring theme in my life from the time I was very young, always coupled with inability to actually earn any money myself to buy any food. I’ve almost always been, and was *meant* to always be, dependent on somebody else to provide for me, and that has done Things to my wiring, which I don’t think I’m articulate enough to parse out right now.

(I think, at least partly… I’m not sure this even comes out in words, but I think there’s a thing I need to think at when I have words, which is that I – I don’t think I see working as me *earning money*. I think I see it as me doing what is incomprehensibly required by the eldritch deities that control whether I get to live. Like there’s a… you see posts about “you have rights as a worker, the company needs you, you have some control here”, etc etc, and I… can’t parse that? It fritzes me out. I can’t process the idea of me having any power in that equation. I’m supposed to only take what I get and be thankful they allow me to serve them. I think I see it as even more dysfunctional and abusive than how most workers in late-stage capitalism see it, and that makes it harder for me to deal with long-term. But that probably needs to be a post when I have slept recently.)

Where was I? Right. Tied into the same traumas is the – well, the brainwashing, that I eat Too Much. That no matter how little I eat, I have to eat less, because I am the Fat. (I’ve said this before, but my skeleton alone is probably hefty enough to play high school football. I’m never gonna be acceptably skinny, even if I literally starve to death.) So the… concept of feeding all my future selves, ties into that irrational belief – the idea that not only is it impossible to amass that much money under late-stage capitalism because the elder gods will not give it to me, but it’s impossible for there to *exist* enough money to feed all my future selves, because I’m like one of those entities in the one Norse myth. You know, the one where the cat was Jormungandr. Words aren’t wording and I can’t identify *which* entity; I feel like the logical one would be fire, the one that eats everything faster than anyone, but I keep thinking of the cup tied to the sea. But, I mean – am I making any sense? This irrational belief that no matter how much money I ever have, I will eat it all. (And that there will be other disasters, that I’ll always have to fix my car or buy new shoes or whatever, but fundamentally: that my needs are too much, that I’m too greedy, that no matter how much money there is, I will use it all up, because I am Bad and demanding and selfish and I take and take and take and never give. But also specifically that if I could eat, and I wasn’t forced to pinch pennies or count calories or be *controlled* somehow by people or circumstances, that I would literally never stop eating and I would eat and eat and eat all the food and all the money and use up all the resources and devour the world. Maybe *I’m* Jormungandr. ;P)

Uh. That… that turned into a thing. I really hope Tumblr doesn’t eat this. It hasn’t eaten any reblog posts I tried to make on my laptop *yet*, but I’m gonna copy it first anyway.

Anyway. All of that was approximately the first of the two things that I was trying to say here. The other one is, of course, that I also don’t actually believe in my future self existing. Any of my future selves. Again, it’s a trauma thing (obviously), but it doesn’t make it any less… convincing. It’s hard to feel like saving up to support my future self has any validity when I’m quite certain – not at all rationally, but still quite certain – that I’m gonna either keel over or kill myself sometime in the next few years. Or that somebody else will kill me. Something along those lines. “Sense of foreshortened future”, that one post called it. I died too young and now my brain can’t stop thinking I’m going to keep dying.

*sigh* I don’t even know if any of that made any sense. Basically I think it’s just a lot of irrational beliefs that I know are irrational but I can’t seem to uninstall them. But maybe writing them down will… help, at some point? Possibly?

>>One is, I don’t think I believe, subconsciously, that it’s *possible* to have enough money to feed all of my future selves.<<

Sometimes I try running some calculations regarding how much money my household would need in order to live off the interest, and depending on what assumptions I feed into the model I tend to get results in the 1 – 2 million USD range.

And on the one hand that’s a lot of money, but at the same time it’s not nearly as much money as I might have guessed off the top of my head. *And* that’s assuming the goal is to not–in an average year–have to touch the money originally invested at all, rather than merely having funds that aren’t due to run out until after dying of old age. (Brain: “The point is to *not* die; why would I make Plan A’s that rely on me dying at some point?”)

(Not to mention the various in-between consolation-prize states, in which one can cover a significant chunk of one’s expenses with interest and only needs to find a *little* work to cover the rest, which is not entirely safe but still quite an improvement.)

You might not find that sort of thing helpful yourself, but personally I find it reassuring to have a sense of the end goal. Even if I have a hard time believing I’ll ever actually have that kind of money, I like having an idea of what Enough money would look like, to help me know where I stand.

—

I was mostly using food as a metonym for necessities, but yeah, it does sound like you’ve got some food-specific brain issues.

(I have fairly low food needs myself, but that’s really just luck. Luck that I have a low metabolism, luck that when a nasty stomach bug in 2012 gave my gut flora a hard whack I found that afterwards my appetite now matched said metabolism rather than being slightly higher, luck that I live in a place where drinking water is extremely easy to source so that needing an extra 2 – 3 litres of water a day doesn’t cause more problems than needing less food prevents. (I don’t expect those things are *directly* related, but all bodies have their own quirks, and some circumstances are more amenable to some quirks than others.))

—

>>I don’t think I see working as me *earning money*. I think I see it as me doing what is incomprehensibly required by the eldritch deities that control whether I get to live.<<

I wonder if something like that isn’t more common than one might think, though maybe not to the same severity and…I think it’s particularly expected of *higher*-tier workers? Like, cubicle farmers and stuff. There is *some* room in the cultural consciousness for people scraping by on minimum wage to be displeased by having their hours cut, but people with a generally comfortable-in-the-medium-term paycheck are expected to have that mental disconnect between work and money, expected to desire to work as little as possible even when their pay is directly tied to how much they work. One is supposed to respond to the prospect of an additional day off with “Sweet, vacation!”, not “Damn, I wanted some more metaphorical acorns to squirrel away for later.”

(and even with low-tier stuff, I *still* sometimes get people expecting me to be pleased if one of my shifts gets removed from the schedule. even my own mother does this sometimes, and she *really* should know better.)

(And yeah, this is another financial aspect where I have the opposite psychological issues to you: I’m *acutely* aware of the connection between work and money. I still have a hard time believing that anyone is willing to pay me $14/hour just to do *this*, and I feel like I have to constantly justify my wage.

On the bright side, I think that *has* gotten me a niche in the employee schedule: slow times and times when he’s not *entirely* sure he needs an extra person on but the risk of being understaffed if he doesn’t is too great. My *top* speed is not very good, but my *average* speed can be quite competitive, because I keep looking for things to do long after everyone else has given up and started looking at stuff on their smartphones (or chatting to each other, or showing each other stuff on their smartphones). And if he puts me on and then finds out too late he didn’t need me after all, he gets a consolation prize of cleaner walls.)

—

>>“Sense of foreshortened future”, that one post called it. I died too young and now my brain can’t stop thinking I’m going to keep dying.<<

Reminds me of a conversation we had a while back regarding nausea, where the same basic impulse manifests in *your* brain as “I want to die” and in *my* brain as “I want to be temporarily unconscious; please wake me when this is over”.

Tags:

#…and now I’m late for bed #oops #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #disordered eating #abuse cw #suicide cw #death tw #long post #(the following category tags were added retroactively:) #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

This draft’s original set of tags (here left intact) refers to late January 2014 as being nearly three years ago, so that gives you an idea of when it was written.

—

“Even if the risks are small, they are not justified when the evidence indicates no benefit.”

–Steven Novella, on acupuncture

–Also me, on fluid exchange

Tags:

#if I ask myself ”Is kissing this person worth the risk of oral herpes?” #and conclude ”no” #this doesn’t mean that the value I place on not having herpes is too high #it just means the value I place on kissing them is very low #such that even the slightest downside is enough to outweigh it #(I mean I *am* somewhat germophobic and *do* place significant value on not having herpes) #(but I think I would be pretty cautious about who I spit-bond with even if I weren’t germophobic) #(I would still have a mild incentive to be cautious and no incentive *not* to be cautious) #((I suppose non-germophobic!me would have to be less desperate in order to accept a shared water bottle)) #((but that’s about it)) #oh look an original post #tag rambles #illness tw? #asexuality #((yes that post I linked is nearly three years old)) #((I’ve had it sitting around in my quote file for just such an occasion))

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

While I’ve completed the move to the new laptop [link], it’s occurred to me that my on-site Tumblr drafts folder is also not included in my backups, and I should probably clear *these* drafts out too.

Tumblr doesn’t seem to provide information on when a draft was made, but this one was already pretty old when I mentioned it in June 2017 [link]. It also pre-dates my switch from italics to asterisks to denote emphasis: I have edited its word-emphasis method to help the emphasis show up more reliably.

(This post is not entirely unrelated to my previous post [link], which is what reminded me to do this now.)

—

I was sick, and it was the middle of the night, and earlier I’d been having problems where my brain would skip straight to dreaming while neglecting to fall asleep first. (It is a strange and unpleasant experience to dream non-lucidly despite also being aware of one’s body lying on one’s bed. Especially if one is having a nightmare about alien invasions.)

I knew I was going to sleep terribly, one way or another, but I was determined to lie there until morning and hopefully get a bit of restorative unconsciousness here and there. (Sometimes I get to bed a bit late, but if it is Designated Sleeping Time *and* I have already gone to bed, by god I will lie there as long as it takes (or until 8 AM or so, whichever comes first). I do not give up on bedtime.)

A couple hours in, I heard a voice in my head. It wasn’t mine.

I was 14, so by this point I’d already read a bunch of neurodiversity stuff on multiplicity. I was in a lucid period and knew she was *probably* a transient hallucination, but the possibility that she might not be didn’t freak me out.

I calmly explained to her that while I was not *inherently* averse to considering her a real person, given the circumstances I was understandably reluctant to assume sapience, and she would probably do the same in my place. I told her that if she were still there when I was fully awake I would provisionally accept her personhood, and if she stuck around even after I’d recovered from my illness we’d start hashing out plans for co-existence. In the meantime, real or not I could use the company. Any ideas for a conversational topic?

She ignored me, and continued complaining about having to share the pain of my ear infection. Shortly after, she was gone.

(Okay, this next bit may require some context. My thoughts often take the form of dialogues, which seems to be fairly common. People vary in the level of independence of these “conversational partners”, but I am pretty far towards the singlet end of the spectrum, and perceive myself as consciously controlling both halves.)

So a couple hours after that, around dawn, I was thinking (like you do), in dialogue form (like you do), and…not all at once, but gradually, I realised: I didn’t know what he was going to say.

And he said “I know, it’s weird, isn’t it? Is this what it’s like, being alive? Is this how you feel all the time? So *vibrant*?”

He said he knew it probably wouldn’t last long, and that while he *liked* being this way, it wouldn’t be *so* bad to go back to being a mere part of me. It wasn’t like it was dying or anything, just…he wished we could at least merge *properly*. He was sad that I wouldn’t remember this conversation from his perspective, that this part of him, this interesting experience, would just *vanish*.

(He wondered if he would get it back if I hallucinated him again in some future illness, if other hallucinatory hims would have continuity with this one. It hasn’t happened again, so we haven’t found out.)

He was, at least, better company than the complaining woman.

Tags:

#whether he was actually sapient during that conversation I don’t know #I expect the woman wasn’t but he was more responsive and *much* more introspective #in which Brin somehow manages to be among the most singlet people she knows #oh look an original post #amnesia cw #illness tw #death tw?

Alicorn | Masquerade

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{Title link: http://alicorn.elcenia.com/stories/masquerade.shtml }}

another-normal-anomaly:

luminousalicorn:

New novelette.  Fantasy, < 12,800 words.

I’m curious where on the tempting/horrifying scale people find 1) Myron’s lifestyle of multiple bodies and 2) the narrator’s lifestyle of wearing someone else’s mask. I find the latter absolutely awful; better than death and maybe better than homelessness or prison but worse than most other things. The former is tempting for the life extension and the extra time, but it would take a *lot* of getting used to and I’d have a hard time believing the other person had actually volunteered; I don’t know if I’d go through with it given the opportunity. Is it possible for two people to wear masks of each other and get the life extension and redundancy that way? Because if that would work and my husband was down for it I could see doing it with him. (I asked him and he is not sure if he would be down for it, but thinks it would be worth trying.)

Myron’s lifestyle body-wise is pretty far along the tempting end of the scale, more for the redundancy than the productivity though the productivity is a nice bonus.

(“like a person with a mere single body was only just clinging to life” is pretty fucking relatable, tbh)

I still agree with the past self running a Star Trek: DS9 LJ comm and yelling about Rao Vantika that I would *absolutely* shack up in somebody else’s body to keep from dying. (I like being singlet, but I like being alive a lot *more*.)

>>I’d have a hard time believing the other person had actually volunteered<<

I also still agree with my previous Rao-Vantika-related yelling that if I had some particular reason to believe I was going to die *soon*, rather than just the baseline anxiety of clinging-to-life-with-a-mere-single-body, I *would* resort to nonconsensually possessing someone if that was the only option available. I’d try to move to a more willing host once I got the opportunity, though.

(I know that’s pretty horrifying, but I think dying’s even more horrifying. And I think it passes the Golden Rule, albeit primarily *because* I’ve already decided I would do it myself. I think I’d be pretty forgiving of [someone who possessed me because their choices were that and dying] because I *know* I would have done exactly the same thing in their place, and it’s hard to be really angry at someone for doing something when you fully agree that it was their best remaining move.

(I mean, obviously bodyjackers-in-self-defence should be as nice about it as possible: don’t fuck up their body, let them get plenty of time at the front if they’re not going to try to kill you (*especially* if you’re using some (non-mask) form of body-sharing in which people who aren’t fronting aren’t conscious), again try to find a willing host ASAP, etc))

—

Yeah, wearing somebody else’s mask is not the *worst* thing but still seems pretty bad. A lot of that is because of the power dynamic, though: it’s the other person’s body shape and the other person’s sole decision how much control of the body you get and when. If it were a more equal relationship I could see a lot more appeal, even if I personally prefer singlethood.

Tags:

#look Rao Vantika did *some* genuinely evil things #but in large part the dude just wanted to survive and I completely respect that #(and because it’s the first season and they’re still finding their feet) #(the mind-transference device Vantika invented is *never brought up again*) #(despite the fact that it should be a game-changer) #(despite the fact that a mere five episodes later they face a problem that) #(could easily be solved with the judicious application of a mind-transference device) #((you bet your ass any goddamn person in that village would have *gladly* volunteered to host the Storyteller)) #reply via reblog #Star Trek #DS9 #it was a good story and I am glad Anomaly talked me into reading it with this post #(Alicorn is very good at causing Emotions with her writing) #(but she often aims for *negative* Emotions) #(and it has been a long time since I was in a state of mind where I could handle that) #(so half the time if I read a new Alicorn story I regret it because I’m too fragile for that kind of thing right now) #(but this was in the other half) #tag rambles #death tw #there is probably some other warning tag I should put on this but I am not sure what