Author: Brin

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

etirabys:

This Siderea post is good and talks about a phenomenon I’ve never really noticed before: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1519134.html

I have literally not seen a single thing on the topic which discusses the phenomenon of people being forced to live in less space as a consequence of outrageous rents. But that’s a thing that’s happening too. …

But you only get to save money on beer by brewing it for yourself, if you have someplace to put it while it’s fermenting. … Of course, it’s not just brewing your own beer, any more than this is just about owning books. There are a lot of ways, it turns out, people can economize on their other expenses, if their living space has the room. …

This is a hidden form of Vimes’ Boots Theory. If you make enough money to rent more space, you can then use that space to save you money on other things. Poor people don’t just pay more for boots because they are left buying many cheap pairs that wear out quickly because they can’t get together the money for a good pair that last; poor people pay more per square of toilet paper if they can’t enjoy the bulk discount because they can’t afford the room for the big discount package of toilet paper.

Owning things is becoming increasingly a privilege of economic class. We’re used to thinking of buying things being, obviously, a privilege of economic class. Economic class means how much money you have with which to buy things, so it’s unsurprising that buying things is something people with higher economic class get to do more of. But owning things – even things that were given to you as gifts, that you made yourself, that you found, that, crucially, cost you no money to acquire, and which you never bought – is also an economic privilege, and, I am contending, becoming ever more and more so.

I’m rich but live in a small space (I’m paying ~$600/mo for rent in a big city) and, yeah, I don’t buy many things that would improve my life (including experimental health equipment that’s remotely bulky), not because I can’t afford it moneywise, but because I can’t own it spacewise.

Anyway, the post branches out some more, e.g hobbies you can’t do because you don’t have the room for it. I should chew on it some more but wouldn’t be surprised if weeks of percolation later I found I’d somewhat changed my mind on some housing issue downstream of thinking about this.

I used to see people voluntarily living in RVs and “tiny houses” and think “Well, you do you, seems like a valid preference to have, and I might very well acquire the taste myself someday”.

Now…it’s still “well, you do you”, but it’s more the kind of “you do you” response one has towards people who do recreational mountain-climbing. Like, yes you have that right, and I’m not going to try to stop you, but why are you putting yourself in danger when instead you could…*not* do that?

I no longer think I will later acquire the taste for small-space living: I am increasingly firmly of the opinion “a dwelling that can’t fit a three-month supply of food is unfit to be called a home”.

[relevant link]

—

In related news, having an in-home treadmill is fucking amazing. It’s *much* easier to go for a jog if you don’t have to trek out to a gym, or go outside where the bugs and pollen and darkness are and the first-aid kits aren’t (and are difficult to wear while jogging). And the limiting factor in who can own a treadmill is very much *housing* (both space and stability: if you’re moving all the time you *really* don’t want to have to lug a treadmill with you), not money: you can get used (often barely-used) treadmills on Craigslist very cheaply from people looking to dump them because they’re too much of a pain in the ass to take with you when moving house. (Some of them will then buy new(-to-them) treadmills in their new location from people about to move away from *there*, and the cycle will continue; others will give up.)

—

This house once (long before my time) crammed 12 inhabitants within its walls, could comfortably fit 5 – 6, and currently fits 4. I’ve lived here for nearly 13 years and plan to do so indefinitely (and since we rent from a bank (via interest-only HELOC payments) rather than a landlord, it is unlikely anyone with the authority will try to kick us out of a building my father legally owns†; plus, obtaining *financial* ownership of our house is as simple (not *easy*, but *simple*) as shoving a couple hundred grand into the HELOC account, with no further negotiations required and no possibility that the landlord will refuse to sell).

Space, people, time: all of these are privileges when it comes to housing, but they are all privileges of the form “everyone should get the chance to have these things, and it is bad that some people can’t”.

—

P.S. I wrote another response to “The Privilege of Property” a few months ago [link], focusing on her apparent belief that it’s more efficient to live alone than with housemates.

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†and is planning to add me as legal co-owner, so that my income will help when refinancing

Tags:

#judging from a lot of the discourse I’ve seen over the years #it is dangerously easy to confuse privileges of this form with privileges of the form #”*nobody* should get the chance to have these things and it is bad that some people *do*” #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #overly enthusiastic parenthetical use

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

prokopetz:

z-nogyrop:

prokopetz:

Prompt: the ideological opposite of a catgirl.

so, a catgirl is a human woman who has taken on certain traits of the cat, which is a housepet known for its temperament – it is affectionate when it chooses to be, but it must choose to be. the appeal of the catgirl is the implication that the woman has decided, much like a cat, that the viewer is worthy of affection. thus the ideological opposite would be a feral creature that is known for being tame except for when it is provoked. countless examples of this exist in nature, so to narrow our options we will select one which is generally considered “scary” as a parallel to the “cute” cat, as is also as far away as viable from a cat. as an extremely social invertebrate, compared to the relatively solitary and spined nature of the housecat, i believe the hornet is the perfect choice; despite popular belief hornets are not aggressive unless and until they are given a reason to be. 

then there is the fusion of cat and girl. the catgirl takes the “cutest” and most traditional elements of the cat – ears, tail, and whiskers – and assembles them onto the girl. thus, our inverted catgirl ought to take the most disturbing and detestable elements of the human and assemble them onto the hornet. for this exercise i will propose the spine (deformed due to our bipedal nature compared to most creatures), the chin (a structure that no other animal possesses), and the penis (for obvious reasons).

thus, we can safely conclude that the ideological opposite of the catgirl is

571e06f36d7dd7d977a5b7e7e4a695d3fda92781

Take your prize and get out of my house.

Tags:

#Bee Movie #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #oh my god #I did *not* see that punchline coming

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

ultrastimpaks:

wait people sleep with their doors closed????

 

ultrastimpaks:

okay now im curious. reblog this with where youre from and if you sleep with your door open or closed

 

cromulentenough:

UK, closed. Why on earth would you leave your door open?

 

sigmaleph:

huh, my reaction is the exact opposite of yours: why would you close your door?

i mean the door to my bedroom doesn’t even close properly in the first place, but further than that the only reason I would have to try to close it is to keep heat inside during cold weather (which i am doing these days, or at least trying to because see above).

of course I live alone, so the only person walking through doors anyway is me; closing them seems a waste of effort if I’m going to open them again later, so why do it in the first place. But even when I lived with other people closing my door was an exceptional I-am-naked-right-now-don’t-come-in situation, or to stop the light from bothering others when I stayed up late; since neither of those is the case when I sleep, I didn’t see a point to closing the door

 

moonlit-tulip:

Closed, to block sound and light from the rest of the house. I’m from the USA, specifically New Jersey.

When my door is open, I’m much more likely to be woken by people using the bathroom (which is just outside my door) in the middle of the night, and by people talking pretty much anywhere in the house in the morning if I’m not already awake by then. Closing the door neatly blocks out those problems, as well as additionally blocking out the “I’m not necessarily the last person to go to sleep” problem and its associated sounds and lights around the start of my sleep cycle.

(My door is by no means perfect at blocking either light or sound when closed—it has a couple-inch crack underneath through which both can still get in, and also sound has a way of getting into my room through the floor and walls—but its closed state is still a whole lot more effective at both than its open state is.)

It depends on circumstances.

In New Jersey before the age of 12 or so, I slept with my door open and felt vaguely guilty about it: the children’s books on dealing with disasters said you should always sleep with your door closed, so that if a fire broke out elsewhere in the house there would be an extra barrier between you and it (buying you time to figure it out and [leap out your window]/[call for help]).

Age 12 – 13, I went to bed earlier than the people sleeping in the bedroom directly across from me, so I closed my door to keep their light out.

13 – 22, I slept with my door open because my bedroom in the new Ontarian house was not directly across from anyone and the former consideration no longer applied. Also my bedroom was so small that I had to put a table in the way of the door.

22, my brother was leaving the house before I woke up (to go to culinary school), and I slept with my door closed so that him closing the front door wouldn’t wake me. (I managed to figure out a furniture configuration that makes the door closable, at the cost of making it difficult-but-not-impossible to reach the bookshelves.)

Now, I keep my door open whenever nobody is planning to leave the house before I wake up, and sometimes even then. And when I *do* have to close it I look forward to being able to open it again: I’ve now *also* heard that sleeping with your door open improves air circulation and keeps the carbon dioxide from building up as you sleep, and since my room is very small and my house is not wood-heated, excessive carbon dioxide seems far more likely to occur than fires.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #surveys #fire

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

penny-anna:

Bilbo was declared dead while he was away in the Hobbit (and had to do a bunch of paperwork to get declared alive again) but there’s no indication he was formally declared dead after leaving the Shire, even though most people assumed he had died.

Therefore I posit: having a missing person declared dead in the Shire requires the consent of their next of kin. Whoever Bilbo’s next of kin was at the time of the Hobbit (possibly Otho? I’m not sure) had him declared dead at the first opportunity but Frodo refused to ever do it.

Frodo had anxious hobbit bureaucrats knocking on his door every couple of years like ‘Mr Baggins… blease… it’s been 10 years… he was eleventy-one… can we fill out his death certificate yet’ and Frodo was like ‘absolutely not’.

Early on he genuinely couldn’t bring himself too but after a while it was more that he enjoyed irritating the local magistrate’s office than anything else.

 

61below:

I raise you: the hobbitish bureaucracy has no means to re-declare someone dead. They had no precedent to declare someone who was once-dead dead again. They would need the Thain, the Mayor, and the Master of Buckland to agree to changing the statute, and since the Thain and the Master are too amused by the whole henclucking that they haven’t gotten round to it just yet.

 

telltalelily:

I’m upping the stakes with: last time Bilbo was declared dead when he was, in fact, not dead, they removed the law stating that you can have someone declared dead without a body, so when Bilbo left (happily aware of this legal loophole and snickering) he could never become legally dead again.

 

penny-anna:

I am loving the implication here that Bilbo can literally never die in the eyes of the law. He’d love that.

 

apathetic-revenant:

a hobbit parent telling their kids the story of Mad Baggins and being like “thanks to a loophole in hobbit law he’s technically still alive today”

a hobbit child misinterprets this and lies awake at night worrying that Mad Baggins is still out there and will appear in their room without warning

 

cheeseanonioncrisps:

Alternatively: the laws for declaring somebody dead if they’re missing for long enough are still in place, but the magistrates are just refusing to enforce them in this particular case.

After all, last time they declared Bilbo Baggins dead— which involved filling out all the paperwork necessary to declare somebody dead without a body— he had the rudeness to show up again, forcing them to do a lot more paperwork, and this time with an indignant Bilbo having a go at them while they did it.

As a result, the magistrates have decided that they’re not going to declare Bilbo Baggins dead a second time unless they have a body, a coroners reprt explaining the cause of death, and a three day wake to make sure that he doesn’t get up and walk away again.

Centuries later, hobbit parents tell their children that Mad Baggins is forever gone from the shire— at least until the day when somebody is stupid enough to declare him legally dead, at which point legend states that he will immediately come marching back, demanding an explanation.

 

algorizmi:

@rosefulevelyns

 

evolution-is-just-a-theorem:

The King Under The Mountain will come back at the hour of his kingdom’s greatest need

The Hobbit Under The Hill will come back when some punk dares to say he’s gone for good

Tags:

#Middle Earth #death tw #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #fun with loopholes