Month: April 2019

mkfshard asked: I've recently begun reading Pact, after finishing Worm, mostly because of yours and others' recommendations! Do you have any other reading recommendations past wildbow, be it serial novels or full-on publications? :D

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

minitiate:

itsbenedict:

brin-bellway:

brin-bellway:

itsbenedict:

Ooh, hm. If you liked Worm, you’d probably also like @walterlw​‘s The Fifth Defiance, which is in the same vein of realistic and/or clever superhero worldbuilding and has some great characters. Uh, what else, though, going off knowing you liked Worm, and also I know you were into Homestuck back in the day… hm. 

  • nostalgebraist’s The Northern Caves is a fun sort of psychological horror-y thing told through mocked-up message board posts, plus his other stuff (Almost Nowhere, freaky sci-fi psychodrama involving weird time shit, and Floornight, his previous freaky sci-fi psychodrama involving weird time shit) is great. 
  • Do you like Danganronpa? KinuNishimura has a really good fanganronpa called Operation V.K. that goes in its own direction and does some cool shit with robots. 
  • I was about to recommend Floating Point by Stefan Gagne, which is this thing about like, the internet as a self-contained world inhabited by digital people who have no idea a real world ever existed, but for some reason his site is impossible to find- I don’t know if he took it down to sell the physical books directly or what.
  • I wrote some stuff, but you’ve been following me for a while so I figure you probably already know about Cordyceps and my Overwatch fic.
  • The Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer is pretty cool- really elaborate sci-fi worldbuilding for a future Earth where high-speed transportation has rendered geographical nations obsolete, which really gets into the wild political ramifications of everything.
  • One thing I relate to very much like I relate to Homestuck- in that it was super formative for me and remains really funny and compelling and I continue to recommend it, despite a lackluster ending, being kind of off-putting and hard to get into at the beginning, and most people who were really into it back in the day claiming to have outgrown it- is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Say what you will about it being didactic or unrealistic or condescending or whatever, but that shit is still fun.

*

I’m partway through Floating Point and the website still seems to be working fine for me [link].

(I was worried for a moment there when you said that, but then I remembered I kept local copies of those pages, so even if it *had* gone down I could make do)

Oh, thanks! It was down when I went to check, and even now it seems like the CSS isn’t loading right, but I guess that was just some temporary hosting issue. Whew!

Oh thank goodness, I haven’t read floating point in ages but was briefly worried that I may have missed my chance

Tags:

#conversational aglets #recs #Floating Point #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

cheeseanonioncrisps:

We’re doing Postmodernism is Sociology, and the teacher was talking about ‘language games’— language that is so specialised that unless you’re part of a specific group it’s totally incomprehensible.

And, as an example, he gave us this monstrosity:

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And, what’s even worse— I fucking UNDERSTOOD IT. I had to EXPLAIN this to my fucking sociology class.

This is why we should never have let the millenials become teachers.

Tags:

#oh my god #language #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #I cannot believe I actually understand this

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

salenforu:

When you follow aesthetic/fandom blogs but also social issue blogs

tumblr_inline_pq41y0ohdm1rz4tt5_500
tumblr_inline_pq41y1xgps1rz4tt5_500
tumblr_inline_pq41y3mmwy1rz4tt5_500
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Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #the humour of my people #in which Brin learns to speak Pokemon #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #drugs mention #juxtaposition

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

hobbit-hole:

if i had to get in a fistfight with any member of the fellowship it would be Frodo because i would easily win

 

hobbit-hole:

all i am saying is that he would ostensibly be the easiest one to take on in a fight given that he’s like three feet tall and has led a life of (physical) leisure compared to all of the others due to his standing as a gentlehobbit

legolas, aragorn, and gimli are all used to combat, sam works as a gardener, merry and pippin often gallivant off and get into mischief so they have the advantage of experience in whatever it is they’ve gotten up to/would possibly fight dirty, gandalf is gandalf so while weapons are out of the question i suppose that depends on if magic is involved. i don’t think i could take him without magic even if he IS old because he’s a very large guy, but maybe

it would be my knuckles against Frodo’s baby soft poet hands, plus i’ve got the additional height and fighting experience. i just think that he would be the easiest to win against in hand-to-hand combat out of the rest of them. also he isn’t real so he can’t offer a rebuttal to my claim

 

penny-anna:

you’re absolutely correct BUT wanting to fight Frodo makes you a monster D:

 

hobbit-hole:

this has nothing to do with WANTING to fight Frodo, i just think he would be easiest for me to beat in a fight with no weapons. unless he utilized his very large feet, but i think he’s too polite to do that because it’s a fist fight and that would be considered playing dirty

 

penny-anna:

for someone who doesn’t want to fight Frodo you sure have put a lot of thought into fighting Frodo……….

 

animate-mush:

OP is wrong though: you fight Pippin.

First off, Pippin has it coming, so you won’t be fighting your conscience at the same time.

Secondly, Pippin is a spoiled rich kid. He’s no less gentry than Frodo is, but Frodo works out and is shown to have better stamina, at least at the outset. Pippin is also both the stupidest and the slowest of the hobbits. They both nearly beat one (1) troll, so that’s comparable, but Pippin appears not to have got a single hit in against the orcs that captured them while Merry was cutting off hands like a boss. Pippin also straight-up tell Bergil that he’s not a fighter.

Also there’s a nonzero chance that Frodo will just straight up curse you (if the guilt of fighting Frodo isn’t enough if a curse by itself).

And, of course, if you try to fight Frodo, you will 100% end up fighting Sam, and he will wreck you (and you’ll deserve it, you monster)

 

penny-anna:

Also: if you fight Frodo you’ll have a very angry Sam & possibly also the entire Fellowship to deal with BUT if you fight Pippin they will probably cheer you on.

 

ainurs:

Bold of you to assume one could attempt to fight Pippin and NOT instantly be killed by Boromir.

 

feynites:

So here’s the thing – you absolutely DO NOT want to try and fight Frodo or Pippin because they are going to be protected by the rest of the Fellowship, which basically exists to stop asshole Big People from picking on the hobbits. Folk might talk a big game but when the chips are down, you are not going to lay a single hand on any of the hobbits. Either you’ll find yourself immediately fighting all four of them or else you’ll move to land your first hit and suddenly Aragorn will side-tackle you into the trees. And he probably hits like a freight train tbh.

So here’s what you do:

You fight Legolas.

The thing about fist-fighting Legolas of course is that you will lose. This is not a fight you’re gonna win no matter what. But Legolas has his standing competition with Gimli, so once the challenge is issued, he’s not gonna let anyone else step in and fight you either. No one is liable to volunteer on his behalf, either, so you will only end up fighting the one member of the fellowship. If you are lucky he might also take his shirt off. Bonus!

Anyway.

Legolas will mop the floor with you, but he’s also already convinced you’re weaker than him anyway because you’re not an elf, so he’s gonna go kind of easy on you. And when you lose he will be all snide and superior about it, which means everyone in the fellowship is gonna sympathize with you, and Gimli will probably challenge him on your behalf afterwards, but here’s the key thing:

You will have lost a fist-fight to an immortal warrior prince.

That’s a way better loss to cop to than that time you tried to fistfight a pudgy gentlehobbit and got beaten to the point of unconsciousness by his gardener, yeah?

 

icescrabblerjerky:

okay so tolkien tumblr is fast becoming my fave tumblr community thank you thank you all you are the true fellowship here.

Tags:

#Lord of the Rings #violence cw #embarrassment squick? #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #long post

Timestamps: OP & Reblogs update!

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

new-xkit-extension:

Sometimes, time context is important. If we say we pushed an update yesterday, and that post ends up getting reblogged by someone a year later, “yesterday” might get interpreted very wrong and confuse quite a few people.

But we’ve fixed that now! The Timestamps extension now puts timestamps on reblogged original posts by default. You can say goodbye to reblogging old news with a feeling of urgency, and hello to realising that all million-note posts are 8 years or so old (without any extra clicks).

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You can also extend this to show timestamps on all reblog comments, letting you see just how quickly those hilarious interactions take place or how long it took before someone else thought of a better punchline to a post.
Data junkies of all types, this one’s for you.

We’ve also done up the preferences! Want to turn off reblog timestamps? Easy. Want to only have reblog timestamps? Just as easy! Go take a look!

As always, if you have any problems, questions or anything else to say about this update, our askbox and Discord server are open as usual, or you can open a GitHub issue if you’d rather!

Enjoy!

Tags:

#The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #this update is fantastic and I highly recommend it #also I didn’t even realise until reading this that there’s an option to make *every* link in a reblog chain show a timestamp #(as opposed to just OP + the last link) #so I turned that on and now it’s even more amazing

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

the-real-numbers:

tumblr_ppp5riwnel1vubbfh_500

(x)

Tags:

#storytime #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #(I’m not saying I *believe* this but it *is* funny) #((it’s times like these I’m glad my tagging system does not make a distinction between non-fiction and origfic))

mkfshard asked: I've recently begun reading Pact, after finishing Worm, mostly because of yours and others' recommendations! Do you have any other reading recommendations past wildbow, be it serial novels or full-on publications? :D

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

brin-bellway:

itsbenedict:

Ooh, hm. If you liked Worm, you’d probably also like @walterlw​‘s The Fifth Defiance, which is in the same vein of realistic and/or clever superhero worldbuilding and has some great characters. Uh, what else, though, going off knowing you liked Worm, and also I know you were into Homestuck back in the day… hm. 

  • nostalgebraist’s The Northern Caves is a fun sort of psychological horror-y thing told through mocked-up message board posts, plus his other stuff (Almost Nowhere, freaky sci-fi psychodrama involving weird time shit, and Floornight, his previous freaky sci-fi psychodrama involving weird time shit) is great. 
  • Do you like Danganronpa? KinuNishimura has a really good fanganronpa called Operation V.K. that goes in its own direction and does some cool shit with robots. 
  • I was about to recommend Floating Point by Stefan Gagne, which is this thing about like, the internet as a self-contained world inhabited by digital people who have no idea a real world ever existed, but for some reason his site is impossible to find- I don’t know if he took it down to sell the physical books directly or what.
  • I wrote some stuff, but you’ve been following me for a while so I figure you probably already know about Cordyceps and my Overwatch fic.
  • The Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer is pretty cool- really elaborate sci-fi worldbuilding for a future Earth where high-speed transportation has rendered geographical nations obsolete, which really gets into the wild political ramifications of everything.
  • One thing I relate to very much like I relate to Homestuck- in that it was super formative for me and remains really funny and compelling and I continue to recommend it, despite a lackluster ending, being kind of off-putting and hard to get into at the beginning, and most people who were really into it back in the day claiming to have outgrown it- is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Say what you will about it being didactic or unrealistic or condescending or whatever, but that shit is still fun.

*

I’m partway through Floating Point and the website still seems to be working fine for me [link].

(I was worried for a moment there when you said that, but then I remembered I kept local copies of those pages, so even if it *had* gone down I could make do)

Tags:

#also: good taste #though a bit horror-y at points #recs #reply via reblog #Floating Point #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

{{next post in sequence}}

mkfshard asked: I've recently begun reading Pact, after finishing Worm, mostly because of yours and others' recommendations! Do you have any other reading recommendations past wildbow, be it serial novels or full-on publications? :D

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

itsbenedict:

Ooh, hm. If you liked Worm, you’d probably also like @walterlw​‘s The Fifth Defiance, which is in the same vein of realistic and/or clever superhero worldbuilding and has some great characters. Uh, what else, though, going off knowing you liked Worm, and also I know you were into Homestuck back in the day… hm. 

  • nostalgebraist’s The Northern Caves is a fun sort of psychological horror-y thing told through mocked-up message board posts, plus his other stuff (Almost Nowhere, freaky sci-fi psychodrama involving weird time shit, and Floornight, his previous freaky sci-fi psychodrama involving weird time shit) is great. 
  • Do you like Danganronpa? KinuNishimura has a really good fanganronpa called Operation V.K. that goes in its own direction and does some cool shit with robots. 
  • I was about to recommend Floating Point by Stefan Gagne, which is this thing about like, the internet as a self-contained world inhabited by digital people who have no idea a real world ever existed, but for some reason his site is impossible to find- I don’t know if he took it down to sell the physical books directly or what.
  • I wrote some stuff, but you’ve been following me for a while so I figure you probably already know about Cordyceps and my Overwatch fic.
  • The Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer is pretty cool- really elaborate sci-fi worldbuilding for a future Earth where high-speed transportation has rendered geographical nations obsolete, which really gets into the wild political ramifications of everything.
  • One thing I relate to very much like I relate to Homestuck- in that it was super formative for me and remains really funny and compelling and I continue to recommend it, despite a lackluster ending, being kind of off-putting and hard to get into at the beginning, and most people who were really into it back in the day claiming to have outgrown it- is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Say what you will about it being didactic or unrealistic or condescending or whatever, but that shit is still fun.

*

Tags:

#zeroth degree asks

{{next post in sequence}}