Month: March 2020

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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dagny-hashtaggart:

Finally starting to see a real run on the grocery stores in Portland, at least if my local branches are an indication.

The bread aisle was almost completely cleaned out, but apparently people don’t much like whole wheat English muffins or burger buns, which is convenient because I do like whole wheat English muffins and burger buns.

 

rustingbridges:

Burger buns make sense as a leftover but I don’t understand English muffins. Compared to most bread items they keep well.

I mean, really, a run on premade bread is inherently farcical – it’s a terrible food item to stockpile, it doesn’t keep and by volume you’re mostly storing air.

But if I was going to, I’d hit the bagels first.

 

brin-bellway:

Bread keeps very well if you put it in the freezer. Just scrape off any significant collections of ice crystals before thawing, else it’ll get soggy.

The volume thing is a fair point, though: we do stockpile bread under normal circumstances, but one should probably cut it from the list if storage space is even *thinking* about becoming an issue.

 

rustingbridges:

this is true, but freezer space is typically the most premium space if you’re trying to build up a reserve, since most people have only a small freezer in their fridge (sidenote: if you want preservation over convenience, turning your fridge all the way to cold may convert part of it into a shitty freezer and will improve longevity in most of the rest of it).

anyway I was at the store and thinking about the toilet paper hypothesis – that it’s bulky and low margin, so stores stock as little as possible to not run out under normal conditions – and this totally applies to bread too. it’s cheap, it’s mostly air, and it expires faster than most stuff. so the tp hypothesis would explain why bread goes quickly too.

I was just thinking earlier today about how grateful I am for the eight people who are not here.

Once upon a time, long before I lived here, this house had a dozen inhabitants. They had *much* lower standards for the amount of indoor living space one person should have–by my own culture’s standards this house is not *ridiculously* roomy, though it could comfortably fit perhaps one or two more people–but nevertheless we have quite a bit of storage space, especially in a pinch.

For people with enough storage space and perhaps stability of housing (both of which, I am aware, are in all-too-short supply for many demographics), I continue to recommend supplementary freezers [link]. Very handy for stockpiling of all kinds. Do try to put them in areas where you can keep an eye on them, though: you don’t want it to go unnoticed if they break or get left open [link]. (I admit that our own freezer placement is not great, and we have occasionally lost food to this. Painful, but I expect it’s still worth it overall. Might also take it upon myself to do routine checks.)

(We also have a secondary mini-fridge, but we currently don’t keep it plugged in. Might come in handy for an intra-household quarantine, though!)

Tags:

#my parents may have run out of money but they still have a generation’s worth of accumulated physical capital #which I am very glad to have access to #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #food #covid19 #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

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tanadrin:

A starship encounters an alien probe launched by a long-vanished civilization that downloads a mysterious virus to its computers. The virus slowly begins taking over critical systems, and spreading throughout the local subspace network; although apparently not intentionally malicious, this causes a huge headache for everyone affected. It turns out that the entire point of the virus appears to be to simulate the architecture of an alien computer system–indeed, a fairly primitive one at that, one that the builders of the probe must have long ago surpassed. While the starship’s crew can access the program this virtual system is running, they’re confused by it: it seems to be a crude representation of a three-dimensional space, full of shifting iconography, hideous faces, and symbols that mean nothing to them.

Eventually they are contacted by the daughter civilization of the daughter civilization of the daughter civilization of the empire that built the probe. “Ah, yes,” the ambassadors say, “we’ve run into this kind of thing before. An old cultic practice of our most distant ancestors.” “Is it a message?” the captain asks. “An attempt to preserve some fragment of their civilization? An ancient greeting? A weapon?” “No,” says the emissary. “Just the work of a handful of monomaniacal obsessives who wanted to ensure that, even after they were long gone, their mission to try to install Doom on every computing system ever invented continued.”

Tags:

#oh my god #Doom #story ideas I will never write #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

rustingbridges:

dagny-hashtaggart:

Finally starting to see a real run on the grocery stores in Portland, at least if my local branches are an indication.

The bread aisle was almost completely cleaned out, but apparently people don’t much like whole wheat English muffins or burger buns, which is convenient because I do like whole wheat English muffins and burger buns.

Burger buns make sense as a leftover but I don’t understand English muffins. Compared to most bread items they keep well.

I mean, really, a run on premade bread is inherently farcical – it’s a terrible food item to stockpile, it doesn’t keep and by volume you’re mostly storing air.

But if I was going to, I’d hit the bagels first.

Bread keeps very well if you put it in the freezer. Just scrape off any significant collections of ice crystals before thawing, else it’ll get soggy.

The volume thing is a fair point, though: we do stockpile bread under normal circumstances, but one should probably cut it from the list if storage space is even *thinking* about becoming an issue.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #food #covid19 #adventures in human capitalism #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

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unknought:

Star Trek but when they say “this maneuver only has 0.1% chance of success!” it actually fails, and then every episode ends with them dying and reality resets sitcom-style for the next episode.

Tags:

#Star Trek #story ideas I will never write #death tw

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

judiciousimprecation:

Saw a lady on the bus wearing one of those fancy one-way valved n95 masks, and I tried to figure out why I felt so much irritation with this random stranger.

Obviously the majority of this was just that I was envious she either got ahold of masks before they went out of stock everywhere, or paid a ridiculous price for them, but also I realized, those valved n95 masks are like the exact opposite of regular surgical masks, courtesy-wise.

The surgical masks mostly just block the wearers sneezes and coughs and reduce the amount of infection they might spread, while not doing much to prevent inhaling germs. They are a device which protects bystanders much more than the wearer.

The n95 masks meanwhile, theoretically block all germs from getting into the wearer (modulo proper use), but the one-way valve means unfiltered breath from the wearer makes it back into the atmosphere, thereby blocking way less of the germs they might be exhaling. Thus the valved n95 masks do absolutely fuck-all for bystanders. Fuck you, I got mine

 

etiragram:

Your attitude surprises me. This person is not doing something wrong. Consider the universe where they covered exactly the same route, but without the mask. In that universe, they risked everyone else they came into contact with as much as they did in this one, but also incurred additional risk themself. And in this world, if the mask made a difference, they have reduced the probability of hurting other people by becoming an extra node in the transmitting network.

Feeling irritation with this person for protecting themself without addition protection to others is in some ways akin to feeling irritation for wearing a seat belt. And there’s an aspect to it that’s pretty similar to “How dare this person do the same thing many other people do, but incur fewer costs for it”.

In my opinion, the only thing they could be said to have done wrong is in buying up a scarce resource that some people say medical professionals need far more, but only if they believed they were making more people worse off somewhere and still chose to buy it.

 

judiciousimprecation:

Te be clear, I fully acknowledge that my attitude toward this person was irrational, and I think part of the reason the experience stuck with me was because I was confused about why I was feeling that way. I tried to touch on that in the second paragraph but I definitely could have been more clear that I don’t really endorse it.

I think, having grown up in a country where wearing masks is not a normal thing to do even when (avoiding being) sick, seeing someone wearing a surgical mask tickles the (entirely unendorsed!) “this person is wrong for doing a weird thing, shun them” and normally I compensate for that by reminding myself “no, it’s cool, they’re probably doing it as a courtesy to others, cut them some slack”. Without that loophole it’s much harder to shut that part of my brain up.

I still think there’s something interesting to the “keep everyone else from getting sick” vs “keep only myself from getting sick” dichotomy (oh no, is this prisoner’s dilemma?), and I’d be incredibly curious to see what a statistical toy model looks like where half the population gets ingress-only masks or egress-only masks, but in retrospect I definitely leaned too hard on the “people wearing valved respirators are jerks who care about no one but themselves” angle

Back before COVID-19, I bought a valved mask in significant part because I figured signalling “this mask is for my protection, not yours” would make me look like *less* of a jerk.

(‘I’m not going out in public while sick, I promise! I’m just highly sensitive to pollen! I’m not dangerous, please don’t be scared!’)

Turns out the valve was a weak point and the mask failed almost immediately. Mom wants to try tinkering with it and seeing if she can repair it, but I’m probably back to surgical masks for the foreseeable future. I was already worried that I was going to scare people who saw me take off a surgical mask on my way into the restaurant and then go and serve them food, and that’s probably even *more* of a concern in the midst of a plague.

—

>>I still think there’s something interesting to the “keep everyone else from getting sick” vs “keep only myself from getting sick” dichotomy (oh no, is this prisoner’s dilemma?)<<

The impression I got reading your OP is that the reason it was bothering you is that it *wasn’t* prisoner’s dilemma, that she *could* have protected herself *and* others (with a non-valved N95) but instead chose to protect only herself, sacrificing others’ *safety* for her *comfort* (slightly less restricted breathing, less foggy glasses if applicable).

(this is speaking about the hypothetical world where your intuition was justified; in the endorsed world she may very well have had access to valved N95s but not non-valved)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #illness tw #covid19 #allergies #anxiety #in which Brin has a job

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

dreaminghermione:

Harry Potter AU in which Fred and George are in different houses and they steal and wear each others ties whilst doing stupid things in hope of the others house losing points

 

thatwriterchickyouknow:

Finally a Fred and George AU that doesn’t make me want to set myself on fire.

 

lytefoot:

AU where Fred and George are in different houses and they get their hands on house ties from the other two houses as well. By the end of their first year nobody knows which house either of them is in and just take points off a random house whenever they see a redhead getting up to something.

The confusion runs so deep by the time Ron starts that Snape once takes points off Slytherin for Ron fighting with Malfoy.

 

chippish:

There’s a few months in Fred and George’s second year when they successfully convince most of the school that they’re actually quadruplets, one in each house.

 

roseverdict:

“George! Why are you wearing a Slytherin tie?”

“What? No, I’m Edward. Y’know, Slytherin’s resident Weasley?”

“Wh…huh???”

“Next you’ll be telling me you don’t know Hubert!”

“?????”

 

doctorgeekery:

After this confusing quadruple mess, a conspiracy theory emerges that Fred and George are actually just one person, and there were never any Weasley Twins. To add fuel to this theory, Fred and George make a point to never be seen together (publicly).

When asked about this theory, Fred/George subtly insinuates that he used Polyjuice Potion so that there could be multiple versions of himself at once. This goes around the Hogwarts Rumor Mill like fire. The Weasley family says nothing to dispute it, not even Percy.

 

hippocrates460:

Percy makes polyjuice successfully for the first time in his fifth year, when he finally has sufficient motivation. Fred, George, Edward and Hubert walk into the great hall one morning, identical but for their school ties, and the chaos is so great that nobody realizes Percy and Ron are missing.

Tags:

#Harry Potter #fanfic #story ideas I will never write #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #fun with shapeshifting