Brin talks about herself for a *reason* this time

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

Rules: Tag 10 people you wanna know better.

I was tagged by @cakehorse

Favorite Fandom: I…actually haven’t been all that active in fandom lately. I guess I could go with Star Trek?

Languages I Speak: I speak English. I can read okay Packaging French, but don’t expect me to write it, let alone do anything with spoken French.

Favourite Film Of 2015: Not all that into movies. Especially not into watching in theatres, which are too loud and don’t let you pause and have sunk costs (since you pay by the movie, that places pressure on you not to leave partway through if it’s boring).

I will say The Force Awakens, on the grounds that it is a movie that I have watched and that I know to be from 2015. I watched it for cultural literacy reasons and do not really have an opinion on how good it was (”favourite” or otherwise), but it is definitely a film from 2015 (or so IMDB tells me, anyway).

Last Article I Read:  Um…*presses “undo close tab” repeatedly* *runs out of tab archive*

Oh, wait, “show all history” and then looking at the recent stuff would be better.

Right, it was “One Player’s Nine-Year Journey to Open a Locked, Secret Door”.

Shuffle Your Song Library And Put The First Three Titles:

“Moonlight (A Vampire’s Dream)” – Stevie Nicks

“Don’t Stop” – Fleetwood Mac

“Vienna” – Billy Joel

Last Thing I Bought Online: I bought a 64GB microSD card and a 4-pack of Aero chocolate bars from Amazon. Well, I say “I” bought them: my brother wanted them, but I had a lot of Amazon credit lying around and he didn’t, so I bought them and he paid me back. (He could have paid for them himself, but no sense leaving that money tied up in Amazon when it could be in my bank account*. I can always pay Amazon with bank money if I find something I want later.)

(Because the microSD card was just under the free shipping cut-off, it was actually cheaper to buy the chocolate bars than to not buy them, which is why he got them.)

*Well, in general. In that specific case, the money my brother gave me never saw my bank account: I used it to pay my exam invigilator.

Last Person I Dreamed Of: Does it have to be a real person? I dreamt of the Red Panda a couple days ago.

Any Recurring Dreams: Not by the strict definition: nothing identical or nearly-identical, no continuing storylines. As for recurring themes, I get a relatively large number of amnesia nightmares. (Occasionally they even go meta, with lucid nightmares where the horror comes from knowing your long-term memory compiler is turned off while you’re asleep.)

Phobias Or Fears: Food poisoning, death (and partial death, as above)

How Would My Friends Describe Me: Has an interesting perspective on things. (Interesting in the genuine and positive sense, not the “…interesting” one might use to describe something one doesn’t want to admit was dull or disturbing.)

How Would My Enemies Describe Me: Whatever their favourite euphemism is for “insubordinate”. A lot of negative descriptors for use on people boil down to “insubordinate”.

(I try to keep my insubordination to a minimum, but sometimes I slip up or misjudge exactly which hierarchy is in play.)

Would I Take A Bullet For Someone: Probably not. I guess if the bullet would be fatal to them and non-fatal to me, but that’s probably not what the question meant.

If I Had Money To Spare What Would I Buy First: (I assume this is after taking care of the usual windfall stuff, paying off household debts and charity and whatnot)

Maybe a car? Our minivan has terrible gas mileage, and we only make use of the superior storage space (for items or passengers) ~4 times/year. I’d keep the minivan around for those 4 times and buy a more efficient car for everyday use. (Mom’s afraid a non-minivan won’t have enough legroom, but surely there must be some car out there with both legroom and decent fuel efficiency.)

Tags (no obligation to do this, obviously!): @ilzolende (my newest follower), @ellaenchanting, @orbispelagium, @justice-turtle, @lizardywizard

Tags:

#I tweaked some of the questions #just for consistency in capitalisation and first- vs second-person #(yes I know I didn’t fix the shuffle one) #(couldn’t think of a way to do it that wouldn’t involve major restructuring) #(was not willing to do major restructuring) #meme #oh look an original post #(more or less)

Tag 12 followers you’d like to get to know better…

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

(12 is kind of a lot, let’s halve it. (Has anyone ever made a meme where the number of followers you were supposed to tag scales with the number of followers you have?))

Tagged by: @sinesalvatorem (who is still the very first option in the drop-down list Tumblr provides when I press the at key, for reasons I’m not clear on)

Name: Brin

Sign: I was removed under Scorpio. If I had been born, I would have almost certainly been a Sagittarius. (Watching all the astrology posts that go around Tumblr, Sagittarius is a less awful fit than Scorpio, but they are both remarkably terrible for something that’s supposed to be carefully generic.)

Height: 5′3″ (unless you ask my brain’s internal body map, which never updated after my final growth spurt and insists I’m somewhere around 5′1″)

Average hours of sleep: ~9

Lucky number: *shrug*

Last thing I googled: I’m not sure which one was the most recent. It might have been “for what he thought was h2o was h2so4″, because I was trying to remember how the rhyme goes. (Turns out there’s a bunch of different versions. This one seems closest to what I was thinking of, only without the cat.)

Number of blankets I sleep with: On my bed, I keep a light blanket, a medium blanket, a weighted blanket, and a duvet, which I mix and match depending on the temperature and location in my circadian cycle. (People tend to be coldest a couple hours before awakening for the day, and I sometimes wake up then, pull another blanket over me, and go back to sleep.) Last night, I used the weighted blanket and the medium blanket, and didn’t add another one during the night.

Favorite fictional characters: Well, I do own a Constable Odo T-shirt.

Favorite book: Not sure

What are you wearing right now: Black sweatpants, a baggy black sweatshirt my uncle gave me with “United States Army” written on it (I never wear it in public, but it makes for good house clothes), and I was wearing a dark blue hoodie with “Guides Canada” on it (as shown here), but I’ve warmed up enough that I think I’ll take it off now.

When did I start this blog: August 29th, 2011.

Amount of followers: 137, though that’s including the spambots.

What do I post mostly: Things that amused me, neat facts, replies to other people’s stuff.

Do I run any more blogs: I used to run ds9rewatch, but I haven’t been active there lately.

Most active follower: @justice-turtle, who is good at reassuring me that someone is paying attention. *hugs*

What made me get a Tumblr: Following my fourth Tumblr via RSS. RSS Tumblr feeds (at least at that time) didn’t work very well: there was a delay of sometimes multiple days, and often the posts would arrive in scrambled order. I decided I would probably be better off with a proper dashboard.

(I’ve since unfollowed two of those Tumblrs and one was deleted, making @doctorwho the only Tumblr I have followed continuously for my entire time here.)

Why did I get this URL: It was a pre-established username.

I tag: @justice-turtle, @ellaenchanting, @arbitrarilychosen, @cosmic-llin, @cakehorse, and it’s not letting me tag @depizan for some reason. [insert standard disclaimers about lack of pressure for those I tagged and ability to use me as an excuse for those I didn’t]

Tags:

#yes I am very fond of that hoodie #I’m a little worried about what will happen when it wears out #it seems to have been discontinued and I can’t find any evidence on the Internet that it ever even existed #let alone where to find a secondhand one #depizan #meme #oh look an original post

Anonymous asked: Sort of a silly question, but what was your internet community journey? For instance, my first community was fanfiction net, mostly HP and danny phantom stories with frequent lurking on deviantart and 4chan for fanart. Later I shifted to reddit and tumblr, with occasional forrays into lesswrong and some other hubs of interest. Now its just tumblr and twitter pretty much, though I visit other places. Or if you don’t want to get into all of that, what was just your first internet community? :)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

theunitofcaring:

No that’s not a silly question it’s really cool and now I want all my followers to reblog with internet community journeys. 

 I hung out on Yahoo! Answers for a couple years (12-14), lurked various advice columns because I find them fascinating, got into Harry Potter fanfiction on fanfiction.net, found Methods of Rationality and through that LessWrong, where there are embarrassing posts as a record of my age-17 Eliezer-fangirl stage, got into the tumblr Silmarillion fandom, burned out of the tumblr Silmarillion fandom, got into tumblr SJ, and wound up here. The only sites I read reliably now are tumblr, slatestarcodex, and aforementioned advice columns. 

This tracks only slightly with my special interests during the relevant time periods, which from high school forward were the TV show 24 , Crichton/King/Grisham generic adult thrillers, Christian apocalyptic fiction, LessWrong, the Silmarillion, the manosphere and neoreaction, Clara, the Silmarillion again, social justice, and Current Special Interest which is a secret for obvious reasons. 

 

(This ended up much longer and more detailed than the other responses I’ve seen. I hope it’s long and detailed in a good way.)

When I was young, the primary places I went on the Internet were Nethack fansites (though I only lurked), the official Chalkzone discussion board on the Nickelodeon forums (my first fandom (and first perseveration that I can recall*), age eight), and–slightly later–Neopets. These aren’t connected to later events, though.

The continuous journey, the one that led me to where I am today, started when I was thirteen, and I saw that under the “other” section of the Girl Scout day-trip medical form Mom had written that I was autistic. (Her point being that if the supervisors saw me sneaking off to find a quiet spot to recover from all the noise and activity, they should let me.)

She later insisted that she’d already told me a few years previously, but either she misremembered, or she’d told me but not explained and I’d registered it as a meaningless, forgettable word (like I had “Presbyterian”), because it was news to me.

Of course, I had to learn more about this. Some news article led me to The Autism Crisis, which despite the name is a neurodiversity-based autism blog. This led me to other neurodiversity-based autism websites (at one point around this time I read the entire autistics.org library), and from there other neurodiversity sites. (This is why part of me always feels surprised when people who have been hanging out on the Internet for a while don’t have at least a basic working knowledge of multiplicity. Within a month or two of venturing out into the big wide Internet, I knew how to parse a caret in someone’s name.)

(During this time, the summer of 2007, I also read through the entire mental health section of when was then my local library. (It was a pretty big library.) The juxtaposition of these books with the blogs I was reading was an interesting experience.)

Stuff about snake-oil autism treatments led me to the skeptical blogosphere. One of the more religion-focused ones had a link to the Left Behind tag on Slacktivist, which I have updated here to reflect his move from Typepad to Patheos. (If there’s a way to make that show in chronological order, I don’t know it. I’ve linked to what is currently the last page.) I read the posts and left. I didn’t read the comments. Not yet.

When I was bored, I spent a lot of time reading TV Tropes. This gave me a lot of cultural osmosis that still serves me well today, as well as an epiphany about my sexuality. (No, really. It had never occurred to me that “fetish” was a framework that could apply to my particular fascination, but once they pointed out that was a possibility, I realised it made so much sense.)

It was probably from TV Tropes that I found the Protectors of the Plot Continuum. (Their sporkings are a little mean for my tastes these days, and I haven’t read any new ones recently, but I still like their characters and worldbuilding.) Back in the day, I even posted on their forums for a while, under a name I never used elsewhere.

Since I was in the general realm of sporking, there were more links to the Left Behind posts. I went through the “oh, right, that exists. *catches up on posts* *leaves*” cycle a couple more times. At one point, sometime around the autumn of 2010, I decided to stay. I read the non-Left-Behind posts. I read the comments.

In the comments, I discovered a thriving (if sometimes flame-y**) community of people. They used the comment threads like a forum, discussing not only the original post, not only tangents that could diverge quite widely from the source, but new topics that they brought to the table themselves. They also had the Greater Slackti-sphere, the blogs written by people who commented there, most of whom also commented on each other’s blogs.

On Christmas Day, 2010, I got up the nerve to join them. I took on a new name. I became Brin.

(I kept reading Slacktivist long after I should have stopped, after I began to realise that social justice was literally driving me insane, because of this importance to my history and development. I do still read and comment on some of the less sanity-draining Greater Slackti-sphere blogs.)

In May of 2011, we were having a conversation in a Slacktivist thread about Star Trek: DS9. Lonespark, a fellow Slacktivite, told us about this place called DS9 Rewatch, where people gathered in a chatroom to watch DS9 together and talk about the episode as it was happening. Like watching TV with your friends, only text-based and with people scattered across the world.

If you followed that link, you’ll have seen that I now run the Rewatch. The thing about “like watching TV with your friends, but with people scattered across the world” is that said scattered people pretty quickly become your friends. Not including me, only one of the people who was there when I joined is still there now, but I maintained friendships with some of the 2011 rewatchers even long after they left. (*waves at justice-turtle​*) (And of course, I also made new friendships with the relatively new rewatchers.)

It was probably also from the Slackti-sphere that I learned of Ozy, who at the time was a co-blogger at “No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz?”. I liked them–in hindsight because they were the least sanity-draining feminist activist I had ever met–and followed them through a couple of blogs before losing track of them for a while.

I don’t remember whether it was through them that I heard of Less Wrong, but it was sometime around then. I read a couple of posts, a few comments, felt extremely intimidated, and left. In hindsight, this may have been a mistake.

(I liked the idea of HPMOR, but didn’t hear of it until after I reached the “perpetually buried in reading material” stage of Internet usage, and have never gotten around to it. I did read Luminosity, and greatly enjoyed it. The protagonist’s clever exploitation of the local laws of nature reminded me of the books of Jewish folktales I loved as a child***, and I found it very refreshing that said protagonist was allowed to not only want, but seek out immortality, without the desire being seen as a character flaw. (I’ve had transhumanist sympathies probably since reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom as a pre-teen.))

One of those Greater Slackti-sphere blogs was (and is) Mock Ramblings. I not only read it, but kept an eye on his blogroll, reading any posts that looked interesting and occasionally following a blog if it was interesting consistently enough. Michael Mock reads Comparatively Superlative, and as it was consistently interesting, so did I. At one point, shortly after I commented there using a profile containing a link to my Tumblr, I received a “comparativelysuperlative is now following you” notification. I read his Tumblr archive, found he was consistently interesting there too, and followed him back.

A few months back, he reblogged a post from you. I don’t remember which one it was, but it was interesting enough that I looked into the rest of your blog.

It was…I’m not quite sure how to put it. It was like seeing a braver version of myself, saying publicly the things I had hardly dared even to think. I…may have read your entire archive, and been disappointed when I found you had only been blogging there for eight months. I spread my net, reading other rationalist Tumblrs you linked to. I found that when I had encountered some particularly unhealthy piece of social-justice writing and it was getting me down, reading them helped me feel better. I realised that this was where I needed to be.

*It was also the first that I could recall at the time; I remember being surprised when it shifted.

**The thing that we now call “callout culture” tends to get treated as a Tumblr-specific or at least Tumblr-induced problem. It’s not. I experienced it in the comments of a Typepad blog, before Tumblr took off. Back then it was called “nuking”, and we lived in fear of the nukers then just as we do now. (Sure, one’s posts didn’t gain as wide a reach there, but it was a lot harder to block the nukers it did reach.)

***Possible factor in the disproportionate Jewish-ness of rationalists?

Tags:

#long post #Brin talks about herself for a *reason* this time #the story of my Internet life #overly enthusiastic parenthetical use #the standard tag for this sort of thing is #my issues with sj let me show you them #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #our roads may be golden or broken or lost

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

(tagged by cosmic-llin)

Name: Brin

Nickname: See above

Birthday: November 14th (no, I was not conceived on Valentine’s Day)

Gender: Female

Height: 5’3″, which would be a nice round number in metric (1.6m) except nobody ever asks for my height in metric

Favourite Colour: Blue and green, hence the icon

What time & date is it there: 10:15 AM, Sunday, January 18th, 2015

Average hours of sleep I get a night: Usually around 8.75, but I’ve been waking up half an hour early the past few days

Lucky Number:  Dunno

Last thing I googled was: “T&C”, which turns out to stand for “Terms and Conditions”

Most used phrase(s): I think “Here’s hoping” a fair bit, but I don’t say it out loud much

What I last said to a family member: “Good night!” (nobody else in my family is awake…scratch that, I can hear Mom moving around upstairs, but I haven’t spoken to her yet)

One place that makes me happy:  The Cherry Hill Public Library made me happy, but this is present tense. Hmm…perhaps the Tim Hortons (chain coffee shop and, more importantly, bakery) down the street.

How many blankets I sleep under: On my bed, I have a fairly thin weighted blanket, a thin blanket, a medium blanket, and a duvet. I mix and match depending on the temperature. Last night it was the weighted one with the medium one on top.

Favorite Fictional Character: Dunno

Favorite Beverage(s): Chocolate milkshakes

Favorite food: Not sure. Maybe American-style Chinese chicken fingers. (Canadian-style uses a fluffy batter I don’t like. Luckily, there are occasionally places here that do the American thin, crispy batter.)

Last movie I watched in the cinema: Mockingjay Part 1. I enjoyed it: it actually held my attention the whole time, which is high praise coming from someone whose video attention span isn’t very good.

Dream vacation: I’d settle for finally getting to go to Disney World. We keep having to postpone it. We were aiming for September 2014, then December 2014, then right now, and now it’s September 2015. (Hey, wait a minute, the lunar eclipse at a reasonable hour is in September. I wonder if we’ll be there for it. *checks date* Probably not, it’s very near the end of the month.)

However, it’d be nice to go somewhere new (I’ve been to Disney World before, though not for a long time). Someplace outside the Eastern time zone (which I’ve never left) and inside the Anglosphere. BC, maybe. Australia would be neat, though of course it’s too hot right now, and I wouldn’t trust myself or anyone in my family to do left-driving, and because of the discrepancy between exchange rate and cost-of-living I’d essentially be paying a 60% foreigner markup on everything. Still, it would be neat.

Dream Wedding:  *shrug*

Dream pet:  When I was a kid, I wanted a pet corn snake. I was turned off from the idea by learning that I’d have to feed it mice, but maybe an insectivorous snake, or maybe I could deal with the mice thing now.

Dream job:  I wish I knew.

Tags:

#Brin talks about herself for a *reason* this time #oh look an original post #meme

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

Sort-of-tagged by eponymous-rose.

When you see this, post five memories that seem especially surreal out of context. Anyone who wants to play, consider yourself tagged!

1. “You know,” I remark to the people sitting on the cliff with me, “deli chicken and garlic hummus on a cinnamon-raisin bagel is actually pretty good.”

2. I’m hiding in one of the small storage hollows built into the benches. I decide I like it here. It’s comfortable. I feel safe. They’ll never find me.

3. They tell us that if we want, we can hold a holy book of our choice in our left hand to swear on. It isn’t until afterward that we realise my mother swore allegiance to the Queen of England on her first-born child.

4. I’m riding on a bicycle. There is a skeleton riding an identical bike next to me. If only the bikes could move, I think, then I would definitely be beating him.

5. The pre-teen wearing a top hat and pocketwatch shakes my hand. He tells me his name is Fierce.

Tags:

#oh look an original post #Brin talks about herself for a *reason* this time #(these memories are written in zig-zag order by the way) #(each memory occurs either before both the adjacent memories or after both of them) #(I didn’t really plan that but I like how it worked out) #meme

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

Tagged by cosmic-llin

give us five random things about yourself & pass it on to ten of your followers. repost, don’t reblog.

1. I love Daily Planet with a burning and occasionally evangelical passion. (Go watch it. You don’t even need to pirate it, though you will need a better version of Flash than Linux is capable of, and maybe a Canadian proxy, I’m not sure.) Daily Planet always makes me feel better about things. It’s a great antidote during those times when you’re surrounded by pessimism.

2. I have a supernumerary nipple just below my right breast, which we suspect I inherited from my mother’s side of the family (her brother has one too, in the same spot). I also have a mole on my right lower leg, which we are confident I inherited from my father’s side of the family (his aunt has one too, in the same spot, and I think there were other relatives with them as well). I like that I have a mark from each side, as if a tangible reflection of my hyphenated surname.

3. Oh, right, I have a hyphenated surname. (Something that caused a bit of an uproar amongst the more…firmly patrilineal members of the family, I’m told.) I wonder how old I’ll be the first time someone assumes the other half is from my spouse rather than my dad. It hasn’t happened yet, at least as far as I’m aware, but it’s probably inevitable.

4. I have never left the Eastern time zone.

5. I have sworn an oath of allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II.

It says followers, not people I follow, so picking from that list: shayvaalski, cakehorse, somethingshortandsnappy, kerkevik, thisprettywren, slepaulica, nenya-kanadka (if she sees this when she next comes back from her limited-Internet hiatus), michaelemerhouse, depizan, and luvtheheaven.

Tags:

#meme #oh look an original post #Brin talks about herself for a *reason* this time #yes I really did do fact 5 #try Googling ‘canadian oath of citizenship’ if you don’t believe me