“Sorry this chapter is late!! I spent the last few days trying to find a laptop charger in the zombie horde wastelands, you know how it is. Anyway, as always, betaed by sasukesass52, who spent all her designated wifi time in the bunker screaming at me on discord, so I know all of you will love this chapter and the next. Enjoy~”
Tags:
#@mutuals if you need a bunker beta hit me up #apocalypse cw #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #AO3 #war cw?
(status: I acknowledge that this is psychological damage from an extended period of financial hardship during formative years, but I nonetheless mostly endorse it)
Hmm. I seem to be having a bunch of thoughts and feelings about this.
There seems to be a…maybe “divide” is too strong a word, I don’t know. But…like, I called it “fuck-you money vs fuck-me money” in a post a while back. Even when the actions are the same, there’s this psychological difference in how people can approach it.
When I see FIRE people, they always frame it in terms of *freedom*. (It’s right there in the acronym: Financially *Independent*, Retiring Early.) But to me, it strikes me as being a thing about *safety*. “Enough money that you can run your household solely off the interest from your investments” can protect you from a lot of different problems, and *that’s* why the idea appeals to me.
A few weeks ago I saw some distant acquaintance-of-an-acquaintance on Tumblr (I don’t recall who) advising a young person with a high-paying job and relatively low expenses (Silicon Valley programmer, I think, or something like that) to go on some trips and enjoy themself, because they weren’t going to have this much disposable income again until their forties if not later. And it felt like a very weird framing to me, because…the way I see it, if future-me doesn’t have money to spare, then neither do I. I don’t have spare money unless I can afford to feed myself, and I can’t truly afford to feed myself unless I can afford to feed *all* of my selves.
16-year-old me got to eat because 7-year-old me’s dad put away some “”extra””, and eventually that “”extra”” was all he had left. Where is 33-year-old me getting *her* food from?
Because if the source isn’t me, then I don’t trust it to come through for her. I want to do all I can to make sure that, no matter who is or is not willing to employ her or for how much, 33-year-old me (and 44-year-old me, and 55-year-old me…) is fed and housed and so forth.
—
(This was going to be a tag ramble, but then I thought it should probably stay with the post if somebody reblogs it to respond or something. I’m just going to leave it in tag format.)
#this post probably partly inspired by my first anniversary of non-freelance employment #which is coming up soon #I think I will celebrate by scheduling the dental checkup I have been putting off for ~3 years because I didn’t feel I could afford it #(yes government healthcare does not cover dental) #(OHIP has some very weird-looking exceptions) #(this is probably the result of some kind of complicated political negotiation that I’m not sure I want to know the details of) #anyway a dental checkup seems like a good compromise between celebratory and practical #(and [practical celebrations are easier to enjoy]/[I find myself drawn to practical gifts these days anyway including gifts I buy for myself]) #((that safety thing manifests here especially)) #((the things I dream of buying these days are always things that protect you from something)) #((checkups that protect you from tooth damage and electric cars that protect you from rising oil prices and solar-powered phone chargers that protect you from power outages)) #((this I am much less sure I endorse)) #((I mean I think it is good to want practical things but it would also probably be good if I felt safe enough to want a few non-practical things too)) #(((sometimes on especially bad brain days I can’t even bring myself to play Flight Rising))) #(((that is currently the most common cause of my FR hiatuses))) #(((it used to be the most common cause was that I felt like playing some other game instead)))
#I will put this in the tags though: #I was reading my Tumblr archive recently and *damn* 2014!me was having a hard time #she didn’t talk about it much in public but occasionally she couldn’t quite hold it in anymore and it leaked out into a post #I felt very sorry for her #basically what I’m saying is #hi 2022!me #I hope you’re in a good enough position that you can feel sorry for me rather than going ”yeah I still know that feel” #(but if so please do still provide for farther-future!us) #(just with a healthier frame of mind) #(maybe buy solar chargers *and* video games)
Hi, 2018!me.
I won’t lie to you: I do still know that feel. Things haven’t really changed much for us financially: still a slow bleeding kept at bay by unpredictable one-time cash infusions, still with a-home-in-good-repair being a cherished but distant dream. Still taking some gigs at $1.30/hour, though only the especially easy ones now. We graduated last year, and the diploma’s been *exactly* as much of a waste of time and resources as we feared it would be, though I have not quite lost hope altogether. I have made only $309 in deposits to my retirement fund, in the time since I was you.
Financially, we still don’t have the stability and security that we long for.
*Non*-financially, though, our position has improved. We’ve made new friends, and even mostly managed to keep the old, and (in addition to the non-practicality-related aspects) they’ve taught us (and we them) many useful things. I’m in better shape now: not *great* shape, but on a good day I can run for half an hour straight (almost two miles!), and even on moderately bad days I can do twenty minutes. I still work at the restaurant, but I’m allowed to mask at work now (I know, right, we thought that would *never* happen, didn’t even dare hope for it), and we were–by, admittedly, a terrifyingly narrow margin–not fucked over by the travesty that set the precedent that workplaces allow employees to mask.
(If this were two-way communication, I’d have opened with advice on getting higher-grade and more durable masks while they’re still easy to come by, so that the margin won’t be so terrifyingly narrow. But it isn’t, and I will have to content myself with knowing that it worked out for us in the end.)
(It didn’t work out, for a lot of people. A lot of people, in a lot of ways, are worse off now than they were in 2018. I do not live in as flourishing a world as we would hope.
But we, personally, were fortunate in this regard: we rose through the cracks of the problems that hit everyone, and that actually ended up counteracting a lot of the problems that were specific to us. It’s where most of the one-time cash infusions came from; it’s why I haven’t been sick–not *really* sick, not anything bad enough to make me wish I were unconscious–in over three and a half of the four years that separate us.)
((common-cold-induced depression isn’t normal, BTW. you know that weird non-depressive cold we had in December of 2017? yeah, that’s just what colds are like for normal people. sure does explain a lot about why people are Like That.))
The Ontarian government has announced plans to start covering dental care in a couple of years (a long enough delay that I’ve decided it’s still worth paying for a checkup this year, though I may skip next year). Our parents’ pensions will start trickling in next year, with the bigger ones starting in 2025. I still have a couple more ideas for how to break into an accounting career, and I still have the option of changing tacks and making a living in an unrelated field.
In the time since I was you, I have bought both a solar panel and a video game.
One way or another, we’ll get through this.
Remember, I love you.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #oh look an update #adventures in human capitalism #adventures in University Land #in which Brin has a job #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #covid19 #illness tw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #venting cw? #bragging cw? #kind of both
Solar panels are getting cheap. If you’re like me, then this is all the incentive you need to think about buying solar panels. Sure, there’s a lot of other points that appeal: reducing your dependency on fossil fuels, not leaving free money on the ground, sticking your middle finger in the general direction of the power company. The core rationales for me, though: cheap and new toy. Also, the power company cut me off a few weeks ago. It’d be nice to charge my phone without having to go to the library.
Of course, I don’t exactly own an intact-enough house upon which to put heavy solar panels on the roof of. And, legally, the landlord’s next of kin could figure out where he went to and seize the house along with my panels. So the next best thing was to tek-screw them into the roof of an old Dodge Caravan that I found in the airport parking lot. Insurance doesn’t even blink paying out for thefts from there, and to be honest, anyone with a 1993 Caravan who also engages in long-term international air travel is up to something anyway.
Once the immobilized Caravan had been hooked to my house’s electrical system through a series of illegal and highly dangerous male-male extension cords, I was in business. The sun beat down upon the van, and started to fill up my crappy old phone battery. Excellent!
Unfortunately, that’s where things started to go wrong. You see, my yard is already full of broken cars, which left me with no room for the Caravan. As such, I parked the stricken Dodge in the alley, and had to run the extension cords back from it to my home. The natural place for these cords was underground. With a copious amount of swearing, I pushed them through the trenches that the phone company had abandoned when they fled my neighbourhood.
What I didn’t expect was that the presence of electrical current inside the trenches would soon attract a backhoe. My lights all blinked out, and I came outside to find a group of confused construction workers who had accidentally dug up my previously perfectly good extension cords. It’s for the best, anyway: sooner or later I would have forgotten to unplug the van before moving it, and then we’d have a fire on our hands. The water company cut me off, too.
Tags:
#unreality cw #storytime #I’m aware that OP is fictional‚ but in all seriousness: #you do not have to resort to a fancy five-digits-expense fixed-address solar setup to charge your phone #a Ryno Tuff 21W camping solar panel costs ninety-five CAD‚ weighs one pound‚ and #can keep *several* phones charged if you rotate them out regularly #there also exist pocket-sized power banks with integrated solar panels‚ which are nice-to-have though I wouldn’t bet my life on the quality #(plus you shouldn’t leave a lithium battery baking in the sun repeatedly anyway‚ because it’ll eventually swell up and burst into flames) #(I have a solar power bank but I’d only use that panel if I were caught without my main panel) #(thus far I’ve never been that desperate‚ so I’ve just been using it as a regular power bank) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #PSA #tag rambles #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what
really fucked up that the kids in animorphs went onto a construction site without appropriate PPE
Will fight you
that would also be a violation of safety standards
They don’t work there, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has no power over them!
They were literally recruited there!
You show me one goddamn paycheck they received from Elfangor!
Tags:
#Animorphs #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what
Now our role models are media creations. Some are literal fictional characters (James Bond); others are nominally real people (Kylie Jenner). But both are merely representations – images usurping an essential formative role. ‘William Shatner’ and ‘Robert Downey, Jr.’ are only marginally more real than Captain Kirk and Tony Stark, yet they occupy way more headspace than people that live down the street.
Most people can name more celebrities, in more detail, than people they’ve known in person. I know the names of Will Smith’s kids – I don’t even know if my best friends from high school have any.
Like—is that true? Can that possibly be true? How does that happen? It’s asserted as if it’s just obvious, and it seems like a shocking claim to me.
(Now, the entire review feels like this somewhat. But this passage really stood out as sounding completely insane to me.)
This struck me as one of the *relatively* sane bits of that article, although I think it says more about rootlessness than it does about [knowing a lot about celebrities]. I *don’t* know whether my best friends from middle school have kids, because I live in a different country from them now. I think I *would* have heard if my friends from high school had had kids, but if we had all scattered to the winds it would be another story. I have spent over *three months* trying to start getting to know people down the street, and in that time the volunteering group in question has held exactly one meetup that they *both* remembered to tell me about *and* didn’t cancel. (I shudder to think how hard it would be if there hadn’t even *been* a volunteering group already in place.)
—
To me the completely insane part was this bit:
“We’ve all felt the shockwaves of the Internet explosion. Life is *different* now. It takes an act of will to put down your phone so you can focus on the TV. Low battery is an emergency. Losing signal is bereavement. Navigating without GPS is an anxiety attack.
Do you remember what it was like, not so long ago? How exciting it was to play videogames with someone a thousand miles away? How cool it was the first time you streamed a movie on an airplane? That sense of possibility and promise, like all the world was in the palm of your hand?”
In order of appearance:
1. If I have access to a TV (implying that I’m at home), why am I on a phone and not a laptop?
1a. I generally do have my laptop open while watching TV, *because* I generally only watch TV as a social activity with online friends.
2. I frequently go entire days without touching my phone; on most days that I interact with my phone I do so for only a minute or two; on most days that I interact with my phone for more than five cumulative minutes it’s because I’m updating its software or local files. Note that I have it set to sync SMS messages to my laptop over KDE Connect, so I do not need to touch my phone to notice that I have received a text or even to respond to it.
3. Low battery is an occasional annoyance. The worst-case scenario is that because my phone is dead I don’t notice the text from my boss offering me an extra shift on short notice, which *did* almost happen to me yesterday but fortunately I still had 6% left. I suppose I shall be *slightly* more careful, given that reminder that functioning phones are *occasionally* unexpectedly important.
4. *Despite* low phone battery not majorly featuring in my life, I carry two USB cables, a small solar generator, and an AC adapter at all times whenever leaving my home. Surely someone who cared desperately about maintaining phone charge should be, if anything, *more* careful?
5. I didn’t even *have* a SIM card for over *six years* after getting my first smartphone. Even now, my data plan is 250 MB per month: an occasional backup, not remotely something I can afford to leave on all the time. Everything about my smartphone is oriented around Internet access being erratic and/or heavily rationed: the *point* of a smartphone, for me, is that it can be made largely self-sufficient, that you can keep your digital belongings not only with you but *accessible* even when you are far from home and signal alike.
6. I did not have GPS until 2014, and I assure you that navigating without GPS was *always* nightmarish even when I *hadn’t* experienced anything better.
7. I *do* enjoy watching over a friend’s shoulder from two thousand miles away while they play a video game and we chat about it, although our schedules haven’t worked out lately.
8. Wait, streaming movies on airplanes is possible now? Since when? I was last on a plane in 2015 bold of OP to assume I can afford to travel and that was definitely not a thing, although it *was* a downmarket airline so maybe fancy planes could arrange for it. Do they still call it “airplane mode”?
#Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #reply via reblog #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #proud citizen of The Future #adventures in human capitalism
and with a VCR you could do all of this AND have the visuals as well… but an audio cassette recorder is a good place to start, since they’re small and simple. I would not recommend a boombox, because those are large and nowadays all very, very bad quality.
Now you may be saying “how is any of this helpful, I want a digital file…” here’s the fucking magic. You go into Audacity (free program), and lie to it that the tape recorder is really a microphone. Then you hit record on Audacity, and hit play on the tape, and let it play at regular speed. Trim and export the digital file, and you’re doing gangbusters. You’re cooking with gas. You’re thinking with portals. You’ve won the internet.
Congratulations, you can “pirate”* anything you want, and literally no one can catch you, because you’re not downloading in the traditional sense. You’re streaming to an external device, and that device is recording what it receives. It’s exactly like taping a live tv show to a VHS. This is a very low-key and non-strenuous task for the computer, since your tape recorder does all the work.
*Is this piracy? No. Well- it’s time shifting. Sort of. Tell it to my Steely Dan albums. Tell it to my The Sims: Hot Date VG Soundtrack album.
OP, dropping surprising knowledge from across time and space:
Fun fact: this is called the analog loophole, and it’s completely impossible to close, even in principle. No matter how much copy protection you add to a piece of media, it will eventually have to be sent to a display and then turned into an audio/video output that humans can interpret, because… that’s the whole fucking point
So even if they find some way to encrypt the signal sent to the display so you can’t intercept it with a VCR or tape recorder (which would be exceedingly difficult if not impossible), at the end of the day you just can’t do anything about someone pointing a camera at the screen or a microphone at the speaker. Yo ho ho
(By the way, I’d love to see someone actually talk about the legal precedent of this wrt it being literally the same thing as recording a TV show on a VCR or recording a mixtape off of the radio, both of which I believe are absolutely unambiguously legal. OP may be right that this is literally, legally, not piracy, but I’m not a lawyer nor am I opposed to crimes so don’t ask me)
What’s the advantage to including a tape recorder in this process, rather than cutting out the middle steps and just having Audacity record your headphone output? Is it just that it bears a closer resemblance to the situations that set legal precedent regarding time-shifting?
Don’t get me wrong, it did occur to me (though by the time I decided it was worth including in my response, I’d already left for work) that OP’s username is magnetictapedatastorage: presumably they take pleasure in integrating tape into their stream-archiving workflow.
But looking at the notes, there seem to be a lot of people under the honest impression that a separate recorder is *required*, and I would like to be clear that–at least in terms of practicality: I can’t speak to legal camouflage–the tape is in fact optional. You can plug a pair of non-lie headphones in and instruct Audacity to record what’s sent to them.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #oh look an update #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers
and with a VCR you could do all of this AND have the visuals as well… but an audio cassette recorder is a good place to start, since they’re small and simple. I would not recommend a boombox, because those are large and nowadays all very, very bad quality.
Now you may be saying “how is any of this helpful, I want a digital file…” here’s the fucking magic. You go into Audacity (free program), and lie to it that the tape recorder is really a microphone. Then you hit record on Audacity, and hit play on the tape, and let it play at regular speed. Trim and export the digital file, and you’re doing gangbusters. You’re cooking with gas. You’re thinking with portals. You’ve won the internet.
Congratulations, you can “pirate”* anything you want, and literally no one can catch you, because you’re not downloading in the traditional sense. You’re streaming to an external device, and that device is recording what it receives. It’s exactly like taping a live tv show to a VHS. This is a very low-key and non-strenuous task for the computer, since your tape recorder does all the work.
*Is this piracy? No. Well- it’s time shifting. Sort of. Tell it to my Steely Dan albums. Tell it to my The Sims: Hot Date VG Soundtrack album.
OP, dropping surprising knowledge from across time and space:
Fun fact: this is called the analog loophole, and it’s completely impossible to close, even in principle. No matter how much copy protection you add to a piece of media, it will eventually have to be sent to a display and then turned into an audio/video output that humans can interpret, because… that’s the whole fucking point
So even if they find some way to encrypt the signal sent to the display so you can’t intercept it with a VCR or tape recorder (which would be exceedingly difficult if not impossible), at the end of the day you just can’t do anything about someone pointing a camera at the screen or a microphone at the speaker. Yo ho ho
(By the way, I’d love to see someone actually talk about the legal precedent of this wrt it being literally the same thing as recording a TV show on a VCR or recording a mixtape off of the radio, both of which I believe are absolutely unambiguously legal. OP may be right that this is literally, legally, not piracy, but I’m not a lawyer nor am I opposed to crimes so don’t ask me)
What’s the advantage to including a tape recorder in this process, rather than cutting out the middle steps and just having Audacity record your headphone output? Is it just that it bears a closer resemblance to the situations that set legal precedent regarding time-shifting?
Tags:
#reply via reblog #fun with loopholes #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers
“Every friend group needs a mom friend” no, absolutely incorrect. What every friend group needs is that one person who “just happens” to have a traffic cone on hand.
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#I don’t have a *traffic* cone #but if you’re looking for vaguely cone-shaped items I do have a collapsible shot glass on hand #no I don’t drink why do you ask
Listen im just saying scribes ‘prev tagging’ their manuscripts is part of how we lost countless classical works but those who copied out the tags preserved fragments that r sometimes all we have so :// choose which side of history you want to be on
#Tumblr: a User’s Guide #amnesia cw #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #yes this #also yes I *am* going meta and copying out OP’s tags #they are good tags! #I went and checked because I was curious what level of seriousness she was operating on #and yeah that sounds pretty much like where I’m at #at this point my Tumblr *is* primarily an archive and if I reblog something that means I want it preserved #long after this website is dust in the wind‚ pieces of it will live on in my reblogs #and you can fucking quote me on that
Brinens and Things - Tumblr Mirror 