Month: September 2018

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

Saw an ask meme where one of the questions was “How well do you think you’d do in a zombie apocalypse scenario?”, and wondered how I would answer it.

I would probably do fairly badly, actually, despite what you might think given some of the stuff I’ve been talking about lately. Most of my apocalypse-proofing efforts assume few to no hostiles. I don’t think I even actually want to change this: the best forms of apocalypse-proofing are the ones that make regular life better too (even if there are never food shortages, keeping a supply of your favourite nonperishables on hand means you can buy during one 20%-off sale and live off of it until the next 20%-off sale, so that it’s effectively 20% off all the time), the next best are the kind that start being useful when even a minor, common disaster strikes (let’s gather round the solar-powered computer and listen to some locally-stored music while we wait for them to fix the downed power line), followed by the ones that have never done anything concretely beneficial but at least you feel safer having them around (I sometimes look at the cases of water sitting in the parental bedroom and smile). But being good at violence would just make me more tempted to use it where it isn’t warranted, and that would make regular life *harder* and *more* likely to go disastrously.

The best-case scenario is probably the one where I become the pet librarian/techie of some group, coaxing as much function and comfort as possible out of off-grid computers. Wikipedia is handy in almost any situation, and I bet there are times as a post-zombie nomad when a video game is *exactly* what you need for morale, a reminder that not *everything* about the old world is gone.

Tags:

#can’t shoot and I suck at running but I’m damn good at   #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers   #(<– when I thought of that tag something in my brain went ”that. that’s the prepping tag.”)   #(which is the main reason I’m posting this)   #((will use it on non-computer-related prepping too though))   #mind you skill at running is probably in the Makes Regular Life Better Too category   #perhaps I’ll try and acquire some   #oh look an original post   #food mention   #apocalypse cw   #zombie apocalypse   #adventures in human capitalism

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

archiemcphee:

On Surreal Sunday fallen ginkgo leaves become golden labyrinths. These ephemeral mazes are the creation of Sacramento State University counselor Joanna Hedrick. She’s been creating them every autumn since 2013 as a beautiful gift to students facing their final exams.

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“[My art] is about taking something that’s already beautiful and making something unique—something you don’t just pass by,” Hedrick says.

Hedrick’s designs include spirals, concentric circles, and a hornet hive pattern. Each one takes between two to three hours to complete and she tends to make about six per season.

Head over to sactown magazine to learn more about Joanna Hedrick and her lovely leaf labyrinths.

{{embedded Instagram post: https://www.instagram.com/p/BbuWY3VlyOh/ }}

Photos by Joanna Hedrick, Alex Bohl, and Jessica Vernone respectively.

[via Super Punch and sactown]

Tags:

#art #autumn #pretty things

Amazon.com : Pro Tan Man Up You’re The Man Magnum Dark Tanning Lotion Tan Accelerator Bronzer : Self Tanning Products : Beauty

Link ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

{{Title link: https://www.amazon.com/Magnum-Tanning-Lotion-Accelerator-Bronzer/dp/B00ATDGEY4 }}

another-normal-anomaly:

argumate:

“Pro Tan Man Up You’re The Man Magnum”? seriously?

Man Door Hand Hook Car Door Dark Tanning Lotion

Tags:

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

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

pendragonqueen09:

jagarsjora:

grumpyoldgermanwoman:

incurablenecromantic:

“Old friend” either means an elderly dog or an individual of the same gender with whom you have been secretly in love for more than a decade. There are no other possible interpretations.

This is blatant archenemy erasure and I won’t stand for it

Bold of you to assume the archenemy isn’t the individual of the same gender you’ve been secretly in love with for more than a decade

Bold of you to assume the archenemy isn’t an elderly dog

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(rules of thumb: if I describe an *identified* person as ”an old friend” they are in fact a friend I have had for a while) #((I would say the threshold is 3 – 4 years rather than 10)) #((but perhaps that changes with age as you have more time to accumulate 10+-year relationships)) #(if I make a vague reference to ”an old friend I had who [did X]/[told me about Y]/[etc]” they’re probably) #(somebody I’ve since lost contact with) #(or they unapologetically hurt me one too many times and I couldn’t stand to be around them anymore)

brin-bellway asked: Re: kid shows based around buses, what about Magic School Bus?

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

brin-bellway:

hypnoticharlequin:

Did they ever do toys of that?

I’ll admit, I forgot that was a thing as it was never something I saw as a kid. I don’t think it was ever shown in my country? It was something I only really found out about later on and mostly via pop culture osmosis due to how often it was referenced in US media.  

*

Probably? Not sure if I had any Magic School Bus toys myself, but it was a big enough thing here† around the turn of the millennium that they probably made some.

Yeah, I just checked and there were indeed toys. Here’s a couple examples that came up in Google Images.

(I loved Magic School Bus as a kid, so I thought of it immediately.)

—

†”Here” being used fairly broadly. I was living in America at the time, but I know I saw Magic School Bus being broadcast on Canadian TV even into the 10′s. (They might still do it for all I know; I don’t have TV service these days.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #Magic School Bus #my childhood

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brin-bellway asked: Re: kid shows based around buses, what about Magic School Bus?

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

hypnoticharlequin:

Did they ever do toys of that?

I’ll admit, I forgot that was a thing as it was never something I saw as a kid. I don’t think it was ever shown in my country? It was something I only really found out about later on and mostly via pop culture osmosis due to how often it was referenced in US media. 

*

Tags:

#zeroth degree asks

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

evolution-is-just-a-theorem:

evolution-is-just-a-theorem:

Starting on my final issue for work. Stay tuned for amusing fury.

I was originally planning on not rewriting *any* of the build infrastructure, but it was *so* bad that it was genuinely more efficient to rewrite it instead of hacking what I needed together.

I have no idea how my co-workers tolerated this for literally years.

Remember kids: once you’ve run it twice it’s time to automate running it.

Good advice that I’ve been trying to keep in mind more often.

(I’ve made more habit-cultivation progress for the somewhat-related guideline of “once you’ve accessed a piece of cloud-based information twice, it’s time to make a local copy of it.”)

—

^ Today in “old posts that I keep thinking about”, though this one is rather less old than the previous.

This time, the post is brought to you by learning how to convert online MediaWiki-based wikis into sets of linked HTML files. Now I can play Nethack without Internet access and still look things up on the Nethack wiki!

Next I’m going to research cron tasks some more and see if I can figure out how to meta-automate the automated wiki archiver: make it take a fresh copy once a month, zip it, and leave the zip in the appropriate folder. I’m guessing that’s probably a thing I can do with only slightly more Linux know-how than I currently have. Time to go acquire the slightly-more.

(I probably sound like a total noob, but I’m a total noob with a local copy of the Nethack wiki.)

Tags:

#(also the Crawl wiki while I was at it) #I probably need some kind of prepping tag #it keeps coming up in ways that don’t *quite* fit into the memory or phone or finance tags #reply via reblog #(more or less) #Nethack #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers