Author: Brin

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

couldnt-think-of-a-funny-name:

I like how the only reason Harry is able to fight the imperious curse so easily is because it hits him and he’s like “Ah I feel calm and relaxed and happy…this is wrong.”

Tags:

#Harry Potter #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(I don’t think this is quite how it happened? but it’s still funny) #((while with the *fictional character* it’s funny)) #((I do feel bad for the people in the notes tagging this with things like ”relatable” and ”same”))

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

alrightanakin:

Every Adult In “Harry Potter” Let Us Down At Some Point And That’s Important a 900 page dissertation by me

 

shakspaere:

And that includes Joanne Kathleen Rowling a tear stained afterword by me

 

actual-ironman-tonystark:

Hagrid Is The Exception a rebuttal by me

 

marisatomay:

The Time Hagrid Told Voldemort How to Take Out Something Protecting an Object that Grants Immortality When He Was Drunk and Other Well-Meaning Fuck Ups a lengthy chapter

 

actual-ironman-tonystark:

You’re Absolutely Right a retraction

 

missif-15fandoms:

How dare you assume Molly Weasley has done anything wrong ever

 

kyraneko:

That Time Molly Yelled At The Twins And Ron For Saving Harry From Abuse And Starvation, Thus Likely Communicating To The Abused Kid In Her Presence That His Welfare Was Less Important Than Not Borrowing The Car, That Time Molly Was Utterly Condescending About How Harry Is A Child And Doesn’t Deserve To Know Anything In A Way That Probably Heightened His Determination To Prove Otherwise, That Time Molly Said The Twins Put Together Aren’t As Good As Any Of Their Brothers Over OWL Results That They Worked Hard On And Were Proud Of, That Time Molly Forcibly Cut Her Adult Son’s Hair Right Before His Wedding, That Time Molly Spent A Year Being Mean And Rejectful Toward Her Son’s Fiancee, That Time Molly Sent Hermione A Deliberate “Fuck You” Present For Easter Because She Believed A False Story Written In Witch Weekly Without Making Any Attempt To Ask The People Actually Involved, Those Times She Made Her Youngest Son’s Christmas Sweaters His Least Favorite Color, And Every Time She Belittled Her Husband’s Hobby, The Twins’ Interests, And Bill’s Appearance Because She Couldn’t Be Bothered To Understand Or Value Or Even Be Kind About Them a detailed reminder that no one’s perfect and sometimes what one person doesn’t mind or see hits another person hard

 

themiscyra1983:

Florean Fortescue Just Wanted To Sell Some Ice Cream And Help Harry With His Homework He Is The Only Adult Who Didn’t Mess Up Until Getting Killed By Voldemort, RIP an increasingly strident addendum by me

 

kyraneko:

OK You’re Absolutely Right Florean Fortescue Was In Fact Perfect As Far As I’m Aware a concession by me

Tags:

#Harry Potter #meta #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(I’m not saying it doesn’t also make some good points) #(just that the Florean Fortescue bit makes a great punchline)

Science and Ideological Bias

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

retroactivebakeries:

Much of science has, to date, been concerned with the pressing issue of lycanthropy, or as it is known to the layperson, “werewolfism.” Chemistry, biology, physics, astronomy, and suchlike have made much pretense of tending to other matters, offering up such developments as “medicine” or “computers” or “spaceflight” to justify their existence as ordinary, legitimate, non-werewolf-oriented fields of study. Vaccination? Smallpox was a convenient excuse, but we can all see that the real aim of that project was developing antigens to whatever bacteria might be involved in the werewolf process. The Large Hadron Collider might smash tiny particles into tinier particles on a day-to-day basis, but if you press hard enough into CERN’s encrypted blueprints you’ll find the secret designs for loading it with a massive payload of molecularly unstable silver, enough to take out an entire small West European country in the event that it fell to a widespread outbreak of lycanthropy or a swift lycurgarchic coup. The moon landing? It speaks for itself, one should think. How else could NASA mine the moon with a nuclear payload capable of tearing it apart in a worst case scenario? The average citizen might simply accept the fruits of so-called scientific progress, idly enjoying the comforts of smartphones and hot pockets and downloadable pornography, but the truthseer dares to ask question. He dares to ask, why would anyone invent the telescope, if not to keep track of the coming werewolf threat? Why would mankind dare slip the surly bonds of gravity in magnificent flying machines, if not to rain down silver-tipped hell on the strictly terrestrial wolfpeople? Why the waffle iron, if not as a weapon of war?

Of course, the existence of a world-spanning conspiracy spending billions of dollars and untold amounts of labor every year to eradicate a small minority of genetic deviants does nothing to exonerate the persecuted werewolves. It has been well known since the times of Imhotep and Euclid that the danger posed by a transformed lycanthrope is sufficient to overwhelm any number of armed persons that might be sent into combat with it, necessitating the development of a technological advantage to leverage untransformed humanity into superiority over the wolf-headed monster. Likewise, the contagious aspect of werewolfism elevates it from a mere danger to life and limb to an outright existential threat, one that would have long since rendered humanity an extinct species trammeled in the wake of homo lupus if not for scientific counteradvances. The danger of werewolves is obvious. But what we must ask ourselves is, if we ordinary people are mere sheep to be preyed upon, then who—or what—lies behind science? What masters drive the engines of human progress? Vampires, obviously. Ancient enemies of werewolfkind, on account of there being only so many necks to go around, they have stockpiled the treasure troves of Mansa Musa and fallen Carthage to fund scientific progress, throwing the scraps to ordinary humanity while keeping the ultrasonic repulsor smartphone apps, silver-projectile railguns, and anti-solar battle mecha to themselves. Every scientist, from the white lab-coated goons of the centrifuge mills to the celebrated celebrity wunderkind of the modern media are held in a vampire’s thrall, whether through their dread hypnotic gaze, or by virtue of being a vampire themselves. Galileo? Vampire. Ada Lovelace? Vampire. Einstein? Double vampire. The trend is undeniable. 

Caught, as it were, between a rock and a hard place, the rock being the rock that orbits are planet on a monthly basis and transforms a significant percentage of our population into slavering man-beasts, the hard place being the white tips of a vampire’s fangs against our species’ collective jugular, we have but one choice. In our darkest hour, in the last ragged gasping of humanity’s hope, we must turn to the allies who have been within us from the dawn of time, must draw strength from something we see every day and yet never contemplate. Skeletonkind, our saviors, will rise from the earth, and fight side by side along the “skinfolk,” as they call us, to drive the bleak regime of wolfmans and draculas out of their fortified towers and into the fiery pits of hell. Do your all for mankind. Grab a bottle of milk, and build a strong, deadly skeleton. 

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #unreality cw #vampires #werewolf

Video ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

actionables:

 

aregrettablehullabaloo:

celestial-naiad:

mattheuphonium:

toostoked:

art

This is my fucking favorite thing I’ve ever seen
I’m sobbing

I thought the baby was copying them, but its actually the other way around and now I’m cackling. This is stupid cute.

This video clip has watered my crops and cleansed my angry soul!

Tags:

#(fair warning: I have not listened to this video only watched it) #adorable #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

Speaking of self-sufficient smartphones, and today in Posts I’m Writing Because I Know I’m Going to Want to Link Them Later, here are some offline-focused apps I already have:

Games: 2048, Boomshine, Hangman, Minesweeper, Sudoku. (I prefer to use a laptop for more complex games.)

File interfaces:
    AndrOpen Office: takes a ridiculously large amount of storage space (400 MB!), but if you have the room for it, a pretty good way of interfacing with the .odt- and .doc-formatted parts of your archive. (If you don’t have the room for it, LibreOffice Viewer is better than nothing.)
    FBReader: A good way of interfacing with the .epub- and (if you get the extension for it) .pdf-formatted parts of your archive.
    foobar2000: I used to use built-in MP3-player apps, but that forces you to change to a new one when you change phones. Then for a little while I had one that didn’t offer mass-adding to playlists and, if you tried to skip to a particular point in a track, *pretended* to work but actually skipped you to a *random* point in the track. This one doesn’t seem to have either of those problems.
    Kiwix: The leading way to interface with the .zim-formatted parts of your archive. If you don’t have any .zim files (or if you do, for that matter), they will offer you some. I highly recommend downloading Wikipedia and Wiktionary. (The current version of the app is a little prone to crashing, but it’s still usable IME, and I expect they’ll fix it at some point.)
    ZArchiver: For the .zip (or tarball, I guess) parts of your archive.

Things that prefer to sync with the cloud at least occasionally, but in the absence of Internet will continue running off of their (increasingly outdated) local copy of the data indefinitely:
    MapFactor: Offline maps by province! OpenStreetMaps-based, so if you find an error you can (once you have Internet again) just fix it and it will trickle down with the next map update! Saved-waypoint backups to both cloud and file! Does *not* delete your maps if you haven’t had a chance to update them for a few weeks (seriously, Google Maps, what the fuck)!
    Google Calendar: need I say more?
    Google Sheets: Currently I rarely need my spreadsheets to be offline (a lot of them deal with online games), but it’s nice to have around for the exceptions.
    Google Translate: not all functions can be made available offline, but you can still do a fair bit if you make sure to grab all the offline-language packages you might need beforehand.
    Unit Converter: Internet is completely irrelevant for most of this, but there is a currency-conversion function as well. Never realised how useful a currency converter would be until I had one: lets me do things like follow Mom around Aldi translating the prices of everything she’s interested in buying, to help her decide if it’s a good deal or not.
    Weather Underground: Obviously, this one becomes outdated sooner rather than later, but it’s still nice as they go.
    Dropsync: Last I checked, the official Dropbox app had neither a “sync all files” option nor a “store files on SD card” option. This one does both.

Things I keep around specifically in case of being without Internet:
    OffLine Browser: I haven’t really had a chance to use this yet, and I’m not sure its use case really applies to me (generally if I want a local copy of a website, I want it for the long term and portable; I don’t tend to need temporary or app-tied caches), but it might come in handy.
    Avast Wi-Fi Finder: Whenever possible, use wifimap.io instead. Problem with wifimap.io is, it only offers downloadable maps by city (and doesn’t show which province-level jurisdiction the city is in, just which country; you don’t get to know, say, which of the 12 Stratfords in America it’s actually offering you), so no matter how well you predict which locations you’re going to end up in, sooner or later you’re likely to end up in a location too small to have an associated downloadable map. (In which case it’s still useful for situations where you can use the live map, like “has *some* mobile data but is looking to stretch it out by supplementing with Wi-Fi”, but if you have no Internet at all it’s useless.) Avast is much buggier, tending to lose hotspot listings, but at least it offers whole-country downloads. It’s better than nothing: just remember to take its information (*especially* information on where hotspots *aren’t*) with plenty of salt. (Take wifimap.io’s information on where hotspots aren’t with salt too, and consider fixing it where you can. I like to go out to new places and go treasure-hunting for unlisted public hotspots to add.)
    Nethack: Okay, not so much something I keep around in case of being without *Internet* so much as something I keep around in case of being without a *laptop*. As I mentioned earlier in the post, I prefer laptops for more complex games; however, if someday I have to go without a laptop for an extended period, I want to reserve the right to play Nethack anyway.

Tags:

#oh look an original post #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #recs

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

gasmaskaesthetic:

Why does anger feel good? Most of my undesirable emotions are painful in addution to themselves, so I actively want them to stop. Anger is the one I hesitate to soothe. When I’m angry, it makes me angrier to try to talk myself down instead of letting the rage play out. I can still do it, but it takes a very different kind of effort compared to sadness, or anxiety, fear, or irritation.

Sadness is something I impulsively indulge in, sometimes, but my natural tendency is to do so by seeking comfort, so it’s self-regulating.

When I’m anxious or afraid, I want to get out of that state immediately. This doesn’t always generate *effective* behavior but I’m not resisting the attempt to feel better out of an active desire to stay that way.

Irritation isn’t the same thing as anger. It’s excessive sensitivity. It can turn into anger, but I never want to remain irritable.

Anger moves me to take action. It’s satisfying to direct anger at a target. It feels *good* to rail against some real or imagined wrong. Some of the clearest thinking I’ve ever experienced has been at the peak of justified anger. The risk of indulgence here is pretty obvious. Given how much satisfaction I get from anger, I think I do a pretty good job of staying away from rage-bait. I’m also lucky in that I’m not easily driven to anger in the first place. Most of my anger-management is preventative. I’m not sure what I’d do if that got, say, 40% harder.

I’m curious about other people. Answer all or just some of these, if you want:

Do you work yourself up over things, intentionally or otherwise?

Do you seek out material that triggers anger but does little else for you?

When you are angry, do you ever want to stay angry?

Does that ever change depending on why you’re angry?

Do you find it difficult to notice that being angry is making you less effective?

*Does* anger make you less effective, and how do you tell either way?

Do you ever want to stay angry even after acknowledging that it would be better (for whatever reason) to stop being angry?

>>It’s satisfying to direct anger at a target.<<

Personally, I find anger the *exact opposite* of satisfying.

Anger, for me, is very much about violence. Anger is a desire to hurt the entity that wronged me; if the entity that wronged me is not capable of experiencing pain (like if a rock fell on my foot) or I don’t expect I will be able to successfully hurt them (so, always; violence is far too risky for me to seriously attempt it), this will often spread out into a more generalised longing to cause pain. Getting angry tends to wind up as a period of feeling intensely unfulfilled regarding the utter lack of beating-people-up in my life.

When angry, I tend to feel conflicted about ceasing to be angry in much the same way that I feel conflicted about any other attempt to deal with unfulfilled desires by ceasing to want the thing.

—

>>Do you seek out material that triggers anger but does little else for you?<<

Only under orders. Eventually I learned to treat “pressures you to experience anger” as a major red flag.

—

I can also be conflicted about ceasing to be afraid: yes, I want to be unafraid, but I specifically want to be unafraid *because the scary thing is gone*. Deep-breathing exercises and other such techniques, things about trying to trick your brain into feeling safe independently of whether it actually *is* safe, are repulsive. The closest I get is fear also increasing my desire to defend against *other* bad things than the one I’m actively being menaced with: to use the most recent example, I tend to be more interested in making my smartphone resilient against loss of Internet if I’m experiencing a lot of financial anxiety, even though my level of Internet access is effectively unrelated to how much money I have (I don’t expect to ever be poor enough to lack home Internet (it’s profitable on net!), nor rich enough to be comfortable buying [a personal mobile data connection with plenty of buffer]).

However, I usually *do* endorse ceasing to be sad even if nothing about the thing that was making me sad improves.

Tags:

#in related news if you have smartphone self-sufficiency tips I’m interested in hearing them #(there’s a reason the prepping tag is:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #reply via reblog #violence cw #and more tangentially related: #adventures in human capitalism #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

tilthat:

TIL the average worker in the US today would only have to work 11 hours per week to be as productive as his fellow worker in 1950.

via reddit.com

 

nultemp:

hey fuck capitalism

 

reguess1997:

@argumate relevant to our discussion

 

argumate:

I mean we could go back to 1950 levels of production, if we wanted to live like that?

 

reguess1997:

That doesn’t seem that bad, though. Maybe we don’t have to scale back that far – maybe just have 20-hour weeks. Or better yet, just let the workers decide how much they need to work.

 

argumate:

I mean, they can? who needs expensive health insurance if you’re only going to get 1950s level of care anyway; forget iPhones, plenty of people were using kerosene lamps instead of electricity back then.

 

disexplications:

Obvious problems include:

  • Network effects; you can’t be a full participant in society these days without a cell phone and some sort of Internet access
  • People who work more will bid up the price of positional goods, most importantly land
  • In some cases the old goods are no longer available. A 1950 Chevrolet Deluxe would be dirt cheap today if Chevrolet made them, but they don’t make them and it would be illegal to sell them if they did.
  • Lump of labor fallacy? It seems like there’s some debate as to how much this matters and in which cases.

 

argumate:

cars won’t kill you as easily now, but it takes a lot of work to get a society where air bags and stability control and laser welding are standard features.

 

1nsomnizac:

several things:

  1. why would producing less cause us to regress to the 1950s? what the fuck? show me the carfax.

  2. the thing to take away from this factoid is that the amount of time that a worker has to spend to survive has stayed more or less the same, even as the amount that people produce in that time has increased.

     

  3. in a capitalist business, the capitalists innovate to pay fewer wages to get X products. in a worker co-op, workers innovate to spend less labor hours to get X products. in a capitalist system, innovation increases products relative to worker pay, in a co op system, innovation increases products relative to workers hours

 

argumate:

the point was that if workers today are much more productive than workers in the 1950s due to technological and other improvements, they could work shorter hours and produce the same level of output (that we used to produce in the 1950s).

there’s a bit of question begging going on here though, how did productivity get so high since then anyway, and would it have improved similarly if everyone was working 11 hours a week.

then think about where we’ll be in 2050…

 

squareallworthy:

how did productivity get so high since then anyway

You know how communists are always saying that everything will be great after the revolution because the machines will do most of the work?

Yeah, we already did that. 

We had already done that by 1850, and then we built more machines to do most of the remaining work by 1900, then built more machines to do most of the remaining work by 1950, and so on. That’s what improving productivity is. Well, that and education.

So sure, we could all be working 11 hours a week, if we wanted to get by on a 1950s standard of living. Some do, and maybe more people would if they had heard of the idea, but most people want more than that.

would it have improved similarly if everyone was working 11 hours a week

No, because if we had only been working 11 hours a week, we couldn’t have built so many machines and educated so many people.

 

morlock-holmes:

1) We have iPhones now

2) We work as hard or harder than similarly situated people in the 1950s (no need to describe what we might mean by “similarly situated”)

3) Therefore, all that extra work must go directly into, and be completely necessary for, produce iPhones.

This is a remarkably rickety chain of logic to come from otherwise intelligent people.

“You could work 11 hours a week if you were satisfied with 1950s living!”

You guys know a lot of people who make rent on 44 hours of work per month, do you? And they get doctors who make house calls too???

Honestly it sounds like a great deal, surprised more people don’t do it!

 

squareallworthy:

Well, fair point. You’re going to have a hard time finding 1950-style housing in the United States today. Not only would you have to give up a lot of square footage and things like air conditioning and decent wiring, but you’d also have to find somewhere without modern supermarkets and hospitals. Even if you chose not to buy food that wasn’t available in 1950, even if you forego medical treatments that didn’t exist then, just having the choice to do so is part of the value of housing. So to find someplace comparable, you’d have to move someplace where things like cable TV, internet service, UPS deliveries, CAT scans, and Thai restaurants aren’t even available. That’s going to be difficult to do unless you can organize a whole community to do it, because these sorts of options permeate the country and form a part of our wealth.

 

theopjones:

The fair comparison probably isn’t 1:1 with 1950s U.S because of technology improvements. 

A more apt comparison would be 21st century countries with similar per capita rGDP as 1950s U.S.

But still having the same standard of living as the typical South African probably isn’t much more aspirational.   

 

brin-bellway:

As someone who, a few months ago, calculated how much money it takes to run her household for a week where nothing goes wrong and found it to be *almost exactly* 11 minimum-wage-hours per person, I feel obligated to speak up.

Yes, I have a lot of luck and financially-convenient preferences going for me [link] (not to mention the government assistance, though I’ve known plenty of people who found living on full-time or near-full-time work a struggle even with government assistance; also, these hour figures *don’t* factor in tax benefits), and I absolutely acknowledge that many people are not in positions where they can pull this off. And 11 hours/week is merely the figure for a week *where nothing goes wrong*: I’d need about 16.5 hours† for a week where the average amount of stuff goes wrong, and preferably more like ~20 to get a bit of buffer going. (and more buffer would be nice, of course)

But I *do* exist, so it’s probably a bad idea to base any arguments on the premise that that’s impossible, or impossible without enduring a lot more in the way of acute hardship than I do.

—

(For me, the main problem is not expenses but *underemployment*: being able to live on 16.5 hours isn’t good enough if you can only get hold of 10.)

—

†I know the linked post says 17, but that was back when we had a dog.

 

theopjones:

Imho I don’t think that is too good a model.

Namely, the budget in your link uses a lot on things like subsidies and cross border arbatrage (ie. buying food in New York, and driving to Canada).

These things work out for individuals, but do not work on the scale of large chunks of society.

Under conditions where things are bought at market rate cost, that would not work.

11-20 hrs on the average wage is probably realistic (I currently spend a little over about ½ of income, and I earn close to the us median household income) But not on the min wage.

Let’s see:

Electricity subsidy: 0.23 hours/person/week

Medication subsidy: I don’t have the exact figures on hand, but judging from the way overall medication expenses dropped when we got into the program, maybe 0.3 hours/person/week

Cross-border arbitrage: an optimistic estimate gives 0.8 hours/person/week, it’s probably much less

Tax ineligibility (has health insurance as sub-component): I’m not sure what the appropriate measure would be here. A bit of googling suggests the income tax burden on a household making the median income is slightly under 24 minimum-wage-hours/*household*/week, but I’m not sure how to apply this information properly, and this might not even be the right approach for the question.

—

Anyway, and more importantly, I already said I don’t expect it to scale. (I’m actually surprised that the things you latched onto are the subsidies and arbitrage rather than the lack of children, something I expect has a much larger effect and *also* doesn’t work at all if you try to apply it across a large chunk of society.) I’m mostly reacting here to the idea that *nobody* could pull it off, that it’s laughable to think that anyone could get close. (”You guys know a lot of people who make rent on 44 hours of work per month, do you? And they get doctors who make house calls too???” I think there were others in other branches, but I’m not sure where.)

(Well, let’s be real, I’m *mostly* reacting to the many, many other arguments I’ve encountered over the years that rely on an assumption that People Like Me do not exist, for a variety of aspects of Like Me. I am very tired of this sort of thing.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #discourse cw #long post