conversational aglets

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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alwaysfaithfulterriblelizard:

this egg fucking froze because our fridge is too cold

 

o-bellaciao:

Why would you keep the eggs on the fridge?

 

alwaysfaithfulterriblelizard:

we keep our eggs in the fridge…so they don’t denature? do you not refrigerate your eggs?

 

nanner:

Because of the way our eggs are processed and the prevalence of salmonella in american chickens, americans have to fridge their eggs.

http://io9.com/americans-why-do-you-keep-refrigerating-your-eggs-1465309529

 

colorschanging:

Wait, they don’t refrigerate eggs in other countries?

 

ladyoflate:

wait what people in other countries dont refrigerate eggs???

 

wewishyouamurphychristmas:

wait a second eggs in other countries aren’t refrigerated?????????

 

agathaheterodyne:

Waht.

 

slepaulica:

yeah, we don’t refrigerate them here. they keep like a month or two, even in summer, just crack it into a cup in case it’s accidentally taken you too long to use those eggs, give it a whiff, if it smells okay you’re good to go even if it’s really old.  don’t use the float test — that turns up a lot of false positives and sometimes you end up throwing away perfectly good eggs, which is not cheap. just turn your eggs upside down every now and then to help keep them fresh and yeah.

also chicken eggs do not look anything like those things you see on american tv shows. they have brown shells and the yolks are orange.

 

triplash:

Americans refrigerate their eggs.. 

America..

 

slepaulica:

if you read the link though, there’s actually a reason for why they have to do it, a reason that doesn’t apply anywhere else in the world.

 

slepaulica:

we should organise a charity drive to mail european eggs to americans. we can send them uht milk too, i read on the internet that they only have the kind of milk that has to be refrigerated

 

brin-bellway:

Canadians refrigerate eggs too. And re: colour, every Canadian grocery store I have ever been in carried multiple brands of eggs, some of which were white and some which were brown. (We usually buy the brown: the last time I bought white it was because we realised at the last moment we were out of eggs and Mom sent me to the white-egg-only convenience store to get a dozen to tide us over.)

Who told you Americans don’t have UHT milk? I don’t know about big ones, but there are definitely single-serving ones that I think are intended for kids’ lunches. I used to go through multiple single-serving boxes* of Parmelat chocolate milk a day when I was a kid.

(Come to think of it, did they say “no room-temperature milk” or “no UHT milk”? Because while I’ve drunk well over a thousand cartons* of milk (all bought in America) that appear to fit with the definition of “UHT milk” I just looked up, I had never heard the term before.)

*The Canadian term for this is the genericised trademark “tetra pak”, but since I’m talking about my experiences as an American in America I figured I ought to use the terminology I would’ve used at the time, despite its relative lack of precision.

P.S. Maybe I should look into the possibility of larger tetras of milk, considering I just had refrigerated milk go lumpy nine days before its sell-by date (beating the previous record of six days). Bagged milk sounds like a neat idea, but it’s terrible for preservation, and the manufacturers won’t even admit it.

 

slepaulica:

i don’t remember where i saw it. but it was an article on the internet and someone was saying that for a limited time they had uht milk available in the cardboard box things but it didnt catch on with americans because it was too weird that it could be stored unrefrigerated or something and they didnt sell well so it was taken off the market and it was a shame because they were really useful for people like university students who didnt have a fridge.

actually, i remember reading that they do have uht milk in the us, but they don’t sell it in the cardboard boxes but they sell it in the transparent gallon containers, and part of what gives the milk the shelf life of like a year and the need to not be refrigerated is keeping it from exposure to light, and so even though the milk is treated with an ultra high temperature to pasteurise it, it doesn’t have the 9 months-1 year shelf life because of exposure to light, so they have to keep it refrigerated anyway.

it is possible that the author of the article lived in a specific region of the us and was overgeneralising to the availability in the rest of their country.

do any other americans want to weigh in? can you go to the supermarket and buy a cardboard box of milk that is not in the refrigerated section of the store and it does not need to be refrigerated until opened? maybe i am wrong?

 

winterwhitewitch:

No we cannot, at least not where I live. (near San Francisco, CA) I didn’t even know what uht milk was until I googled it. All the milk I have ever encountered needs to be refrigerated, and I am actually shocked this isn’t a rule. 
Our milk choices range from non fat, low fat, regular, half and half (ughhhh), and there’s the vegan milk stuff. My dad drinks almond milk, which is an abomination. 
And I thought bagged milk was weird…

 

slepaulica:

Thank you for weighing in! UHT milk doesn’t have any preservatives in it. The shelf life is due to the combination of: sterile packaging, opaque packaging, and the high temperature at which it is pasteurised. once you open your box of milk, you have to drink it within a few days, and it does have to be refrigerated once opened because the packaging is no longer sealed and germs can get in, but the packages are 1 litre or a half litre, which isn’t all that much milk, so even without refrigeration, you can plan around using the entire thing before it goes bad.

a friend of mine without refrigeration would just reboil it every time she wanted to drink some, but in the summer months i just try to use it all up as soon as i open it, and in winter months it’s easier because i can just leave it outside and use it slowly over the course of a few days.

but the advantages are: not needing to refrigerate the trucks it is shipped in, not needing to refrigerate it at the store, and you can use it as an emergency food. you can stock up on it effectively without worrying about it going bad (within reason, 6-9 month shelf life) because it only starts going bad once opened.

Tags:

#(December 2013) #conversational aglets #food #home of the brave #our home and cherished land #in which Brin has a food poisoning phobia

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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trekgate:

 

nenya-kanadka:

weareallmedie:

nenya-kanadka:

brin-bellway:

nenya-kanadka:

Agh, did I miss this episode? I need this scene in my life.

Maybe “Human Error”?

Hmm, possibly! *reads recap* I definitely remember the red dress from that one. In general I just grave all the Seven in uniform instead of catsuit scenes. <3

Nope, not Human Error. That’s a scene from Relativity I believe. AWESOME Seven (and Seven & Janeway) episode

Ah, thank you! 

Tags:

#(November 2013) #conversational aglets #Star Trek #Voyager

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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slepaulica:

brin-bellway:

slepaulica:

brin-bellway:

slepaulica:

Synaesthesia conversation!

To me this song is predominantly Slate blue, Dark Slate blue, with highlights of periwinkle. There are some midnight blue and indigo parts. Your synaesthesia might be showing you different colours. that’s okay! reply by showing me a song that has similar colours to this one (so if you see this as yellow, show me another yellow song). Your song can be any genre of music as long as the colours look similar to you. and then i will reply with a different song that has similar colours to what you showed me. and we can talk to each other with music.

if you see movement instead of colour then give me a song with similar movement. (i see movement too, but colour is easier for me to describe in words) if you smell something, then give me a song with a similar scent. so equal opportunity, any kind of music related synaesthesia welcome.

colour chart here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors

This was a tough one. It’s not very strongly coloured, and it’s hard to find the right mix of grey and brown.

This isn’t quite right, but I had to settle.

:)

Phil Collins voice has a lot of bronze in it, yeah. I had to listen to it a few times, the one you picked isn’t very strongly coloured for me, but i can hear the grey like raindrops in parts of it. and in some ways the movement is similar to my song in parts.

I reply with Cowboy Mouth – Jenny Says because of those grey polka dots and because there’s some browns in the chorus, not quite the same as your song, but i think it matches it or complements it, and they both have some bits of yellow. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEfpoUuKFOY

Black with grey stripes. (Somewhat less stripe-shaped in that one.)

oh wow that’s gorgeous. never met that band before. yay new music. dark blue mostly but it has uterus red in it, which is a very addictive colour. i’ve been listening to this practically non stop with breaks to listen to my other favourite songs to find the perfect one. i think this is the closest, different shade of blue + uterus red http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzOnZ4rj6b0

Tags:

#(November 2013) #conversational aglets #I never did respond to this #a while later slepaulica had a brain injury that worsened their pre-existing verbality issues #I think the reason they stopped using Tumblr was because they didn’t have enough language spoons anymore to do that much blogging #for a while there‚ they would scrape together enough spare words every few weeks to post a life update on Dreamwidth #but it’s been a long time since they even did that #I hope they’re doing okay #a few months ago I stumbled across a forum post they made in the spring of 2017 #(it was a different username but it was the kind of username they might have chosen) #(and I recognised the childhood story they were telling as one they’d told before) #so I know they were still around as of then at least #music #synesthesia #tag rambles

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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ophiuchusdenied:

brin-bellway:

ophiuchusdenied:

oh, and you can get detention if you refuse to say the pledge at some schools.  or at least get scolded by your teacher, get your parents called, or be socially ostracised.  all because you refuse to swear fealty to a piece of fabric as a daily ritual.

How do they know if you refuse to say the pledge?

Being homeschooled, my first exposure to routine Pledging was when I tagged along at my little brother’s Cub Scout meetings. By which time I was nearly eleven, had read Guardians of Ga’Hoole, and therefore knew how to look like I was taking part in a group chant without actually doing so.

(Yes, that does mean not Taking a Stand, but I personally think one should not Take a Stand against brainwashing cults until after one has escaped them. And I was still slightly too young, by my parents’ standards, to stay home by myself on a regular basis. (Mom was helping out with them, so I couldn’t stay home with her.))

in smaller classrooms, it’s hard to get away with pretending, especially if you’re with a teacher who knows you/your voice or if you’re in the front row.  at assemblies, it’s obvs easier, but we had to say it in our first period class or homeroom (depending on grade), and being a C, alphabetically, and something of a teacher’s pet, i was usually on the first row anyway.  besides which, to me, standing up and mouthing along is basically the same thing as actually saying it–ymmv, of course, and if that’s not how you view it, that’s totally cool.

usually, though, in my schools at least, you get caught because you just plain don’t stand up.  it’s continue-reading-your-book-for-the-duration-of-announcements-time.  luckily, in high school, my first period class for all three years was choir, and i was not the only person who refused to say it, and our choir director was live-and-let-live enough that he wasn’t about to send a handful of his best students to detention over it.

(this thread was truncated; here is the first part)

Tags:

#(this is from later in October 2013) #conversational aglets #home of the brave #homeschool #cult cw

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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justice-turtle:

brin-bellway:

justice-turtle:

yuletidetreasure:

pentapoda:

Self, I thought, you should check on Yuletide and see if the ball has started rolling yet. ANSWER: YES, DEAR GOD. 

PSA for all those like me: 

Yuletide signups close Monday, October 14, 2013.

We were just going to post a plain countdown to the end of sign-ups, but this was too awesome not to share. :)

48 hours till sign-ups close! (Mon 14th, 6pm EDT)

And just in case anyone on my Tumblr hadn’t noticed already: Yuletide sign-ups close at 6pm U.S. Eastern Standard Time on Monday, October 14 (about 36.75 hours after I’m reblogging this).

(The reblogged YuletideTreasure post says EDT or Eastern Daylight Time, our equivalent to British Summer Time. This is a typo. We are not currently on Daylight Time in the US.)

If you want to request fanfic for at least four different small fandoms (of which you are guaranteed to receive a 1000+ word fic for one fandom) and offer to write a 1000+ word fic in a randomly selected one of at least five small fandoms, all fandoms to be chosen from the tag set here… go for it! You have 36-ish hours to sign up, and must have your fic written and uploaded to AO3 by December 22.

(If you don’t have an AO3 account and want to sign up in order to participate in Yuletide, tell the mods. They will expedite your account request.)

If you just want to write fic of any length to a Christmas deadline in these small fandoms, but would rather pick out individual prompts that inspire you — go here! You can browse the comments directly or look through the spreadsheet linked at the bottom of the post which shows requests sorted by fandom. There’s no strict deadline to this part of writing for Yuletide. :D

And if you just want to read fic in any of these small fandoms — well, wait till gifts are revealed sometime on December 25, and revel in the awesome! ;-)

»This is a typo. We are not currently on Daylight Time in the US.«

But…it’s October. North American Daylight Savings doesn’t end until 2 AM the first Sunday of November. (And even Europe isn’t until the last Sunday of October.)

…I’m wrong? Okay, ONE of them is a typo, because another official Yuletide place said “EST” and I saw that one first… bleh. It’s too dark out to still be Daylight Savings TIme.

*wants the world to stop being confusing now plskthx*

Tags:

#(as you would expect from the post body this is from October 2013) #conversational aglets #Daylight Savings Time #Yuletide #(btw I hear the Yuletide 2018 fics were released recently)

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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justice-turtle:

brin-bellway:

justice-turtle:

i’m not actually awake enough to go Deep with this so i’ll attempt to keep it brief

so the barnes and noble thing where they fired all their full time employees recently. obviously, terrible thing, sympathies, fuck capitalism, etc, but like.

for me specifically, that’s like “welp, another timeline shot”. cos if i had not quit my job there due to snow and crazybrains, one of me in the multiverse was still working there and probably full time or managerial at that point, so like… that one of me was fired along with the rest of them, and is probably now struggling to make rent or whatever.

and like. the thing i’m trying to say is. that’s capitalism. you can’t trust anybody, you can have a few good years or a lot of good years and then get fucked over just the same. you have to give your life to people you can’t trust.

and i’m so *bad* at not trusting. and that’s why i’m so bad at capitalism. actively not trusting takes a lot of spoons and fucks me the hell up. my default state is trust, and in a lot of timelines that’s killed me already, and it’s going to get me in a fair number of the rest.

and i hate that. i don’t know what to do with it, trying to be less trusting is… it’s different than trying to be less empathetic? it’s not “if i do that it will make me a Bad Person”. it’s that i *forget*. i don’t have a… a dimmer switch for trust. it’s all or nothing. and that just utterly does not work for capitalism and i *hate* it :-(

>>that one of me was fired along with the rest of them, and is probably now struggling to make rent or whatever.

[…]

you can’t trust anybody, you can have a few good years or a lot of good years and then get fucked over just the same<<

Hmm. I’m having a hard time verbalising my thoughts here…like, there’s generally only so much that somebody can fuck you over financially if you’ve had some good years to prepare in. But I guess the ability (or lack of) to go “I should use these good years to prepare for the inevitable fucking-over attempt” is in fact the problem (or a large part of it, anyway)?

(It seems like costs of living vary a *lot* from one set of circumstances to another, and figures that seem unrealistically high to one person can seem unrealistically low to another. But in the circumstances that *I’m* familiar with, a full-time minimum-wage job is enough money to support two pretty-careful people or 1.5 moderately-careful people. So if one *doesn’t* have dependents (but does have roommates for the bulk discounts), for every year one can hold on to a full-time job, one can live for 6 – 12 months after getting laid off. Longer, if one manages to obtain a job that pays more than minimum wage.)

(I guess it’s a variant of the idea of fuck-you money, one that focuses on the possibility of *them* telling *you* to fuck off rather than the other way around. “Fuck-me money”?)

—

I was just talking to Mom earlier today about how I’m not sure I’m ever going to be *able* to trust that an income won’t just disappear one day, that even in the better possible scenarios for a decade from now where I’ve gotten some cushy job in an accounting firm or something, I’ll probably still be living on the 2028-dollars equivalent of $1k – $1.5k/month and agonising over every expenditure and squirrelling away every spare cent for the winter.

Which is the opposite of the psychological issues you usually hear about poor people developing (and which you have yourself, right?), where they feel like there’s no point in saving because *savings* always disappear no matter what you do. I think this is because those people tend to have spent an extended and/or formative time as living-paycheck-to-paycheck!poor, whereas I spent mine as living-primarily-off-of-dwindling-savings!poor. Different kinds of poverty lead to different adaptations.

*nods* Yeah, basically. There’s the paycheck-to-paycheck versus dwindling-savings thing, there’s the fact that I just plain tend to be a little more interested in buying shinies than you do (as demonstrated on Flight Rising), and… like, the trust thing from my OP, it’s not just that it’s exhausting and takes spoons I need to work. It’s that… *tries to word*… It’s almost a cognitive dissonance thing. The whole way I’m wired around trust is either/or. Working for The Man while simultaneously distrusting The Man is a fundamental skill of late-capitalism millennial life, and it – it fritzes me out. It’s not something I can maintain for more than a few months. It’s – you know more about thought experiments than I do, there probably is one about this, but it’s like trying to actively believe two contradictory thoughts at once, “Black is black” and “Black is not black” or something (I don’t know, I’m not terribly coherent), *all the time*. If I… if I let myself notice that my employer is not trustworthy, that they’re a capitalist entity and therefore going to fuck me over as soon as it suits them to do so, I can’t… I go straight to “well fuck them first” and I quit. I can’t seem to do a headspace where they’re going to fuck me over but I can stay and work till then. :-(

#fuck everything #i dont know that this is surmountable #because i do know that i always fundamentally *want* to trust people and think the best of them #(in topics for a separate post its so infuriating that these characteristics are always mentioned as making me a Good Person) #(i did not choose them and if i could choose i would not have them) #(its just brain wiring like my ability to feel awe) #(fucking brains can i just have a robot body now and reprogram myself) #:P

Tags:

#now that I’m thinking about this here is another conversational thread I was in for which the last comment was not mine #(note: thread is from March-April 2018) #I actually *do* have a spare copy of this but it would be weird to have to go digging around in my tumblr-utils output just to #finish reading this thread #no other such threads come *immediately* to mind but there probably are some #if I come across any while formatting the WordPress archive and they haven’t rotted yet I will reblog those too #adventures in human capitalism #venting cw? #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #I’m going to tag these reblogs #conversational aglets

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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asexualactivities:

asexualactivities:

[This post is a submission.]

So I’ve been (very slowly, I know) thinking over the post asking for recommendations to share. Yesterday it occurred to me how many trials and tribulations I had in learning to masturbate, and I wondered if maybe I could help people in my past selves’ situations skip over some of that shit.

But honestly, the main takeaway I got from the learning process (other than the outcome) was that the whole thing is a complete mess and it’s a goddamn miracle anyone ever manages to find a technique that works for them.

I used to resent Scarleteen for telling me “masturbation usually doesn’t work the first few times you try it; keep trying, it gets better with practice” and sending me off on a wild goose chase for a while in my late teens. But it turns out that, in a way, they weren’t wrong: while the genital-focused methods they recommended have never done much for me, the method that *is* right for me *also* didn’t work at first and got better with practice.

(Trouble was, I had so much learned helplessness built up around masturbation from previous wild goose chases that for a long while I hardly ever practised. You know how long it took me to reach a skill level where I could reliably achieve effects that were, not just “neat” or “better than nothing”, but actually *satisfying*? *Three years*! And almost all of that time was in making “you know, I *could* masturbate, *that* might help with the sexual frustration” an available thought (instead of reverting to my old habits of distraction and waiting it out); if I hadn’t had to deal with that, I suspect I could have reached a sufficient skill level in a month or three.)

I guess the best I have for actionable advice is to focus your practice on methods with a high prior probability of working (things that are a good fit with what you already know about your sexuality, things that have worked for a lot of other people, or ideally both), and on things that are at least *somewhat* enjoyable even when they don’t satisfy your libido. That second part helps with cultivating a lower-pressure mindset: it’s easier to get the motivation to practice if there’s something pleasant to it (rather than just a gamble at it becoming pleasant *eventually*), and that also makes it easier not to get frustrated and give up too soon. (Although, unfortunately, I still have no idea how to tell how soon is too soon to give up. Hell, for all I know, there’s some trick to making genital-based masturbation work for me that I just never worked out, or never practised that particular trick long enough.)

I wish I could tell you that it gets better, but I know there’s no guarantee that a given person will have *any* method that works for them. Maybe try to make your peace with that idea in addition to the above practising; no individual is capable of the full range of possible pleasures, we’re all missing some stuff. Don’t get me wrong, masturbation *is* a very useful tool to have, and it’s worth trying to obtain that tool, but stressing out about whether you’re ever going to find something won’t help anything and might very well make it more difficult (by loading practice with negative associations).

(this is all assuming you even *have* a libido; I’m not sure which parts are different if you don’t, but I’m guessing it’s probably easier for you to be lower-pressure about it)

I don’t know if it gets better for you; all I can say for sure is, it got better for me. Lately I kind of want to go back, give my twenty-year-old self a hug, tell her it’s gonna be okay, and hand her a guide to self-hypnosis.

Very good points.

“Just keep trying!” is something my advice is often guilty of, as well.  I wish there was a clear distinction between “You just haven’t gotten the hang of it, but you will with a slight modification” and “That just ain’t gonna work, try something completely different”.  Maybe the advice should be more like “Try lots of different things lots of different ways, lots of different times!”

The line “no individual is capable of the full range of possible pleasures, we’re all missing some stuff“ is something important to keep in mind.  I know what works for me and I know some of what works for other people.  When I try what works for other people, it’s a mixed bag.  Sometimes it works for me, but other things work better.  Sometimes it doesn’t work at all and I don’t understand how anyone can do it that way because wow that’s just uncomfortable and I’m going to stop now.  And sometimes it will be so close and maybe it would be great if I can just work out the one missing piece but nope that didn’t work after all but will it ever work and should I keep trying or not.  Maybe the advice needs to suggest all of those things as options.  But that can never catch all of the things that might work, and maybe none of the things suggested will, but something else might.

And so often, “Try something else” assumes that you’re in the right town to begin with, and you just need to find the right street.  But as you found, maybe the ticket to success isn’t in Genitalville, but it’s in the next town over or maybe even on a different continent entirely.  The standard guidebooks fall apart in that kind of scenario.

So, to readers out there:  Do you have any suggestions for telling the difference between “You haven’t gotten the hang of it” and “That ain’t gonna work”?  And how would you recommend finding what works, if what works isn’t remotely close to what everyone suggests?  Ask | Submit

Tags:

#I realised last night that I never reblogged the moderator’s response to my submitted OP back in March #and therefore it isn’t in any of my copious backups #since I often go read it when re-reading my blog #and I’m a bit surprised asexualactivities hasn’t *already* been purged #I figured I’d better fix that ASAP #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text #asexuality #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #conversational aglets

Scuttlebutt

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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plain-dealing-villain:

It’s an open network! It’s a social network! It’s free!

And, maybe most importantly: It’s Not A Twitter Clone!

Whether it’s actually good…insufficient data for meaningful answer.

But if you want to try it out:

Here is a link to download the main app 

And here is an invite code for a Pub (as in a place you hang out and meet people) for the rationalsphere:

142.93.26.126:8008:@z6kCgZREy7sbWZcI2USeXSoMWEcRW+FcNZySNArAoRI=.ed25519~OJg5KQqTMl8TO6cisLL17PHXesMY5gRGVG/iPRcpkDo=

Here’s the page for the overall “what is this anyway?”

 

spiralingintocontrol:

why are there so many protocols… why do Tent and Mastodon and Scuttlebutt have their own protocols… this is what a “protocol” is for, it’s for multiple things to use…. hnnnnggghhhh

I’ll check it out I guess, as long as they have a linux client

 

somnilogical:

importantly here is an android app for it:

https://www.manyver.se/

 

brin-bellway:

The main problem I had when first attempting to use Scuttlebutt was that–unless you have the knowledge and resources to run your own pub, which I do not–it forces you to integrate into the pre-existing web of social connections, unable to import the relationships you’ve already formed elsewhere. Which *is* a great way to make new friends, and that *is* very much a valuable role to play, but right now I’m focused on keeping the old ones.

A ratsphere pub sounds very promising. I think I’ll be giving this another try.

(They do have a Linux client. Source: am on Linux, have used their client.)

 

plain-dealing-villain:

Running your own pub has been made pretty easy. There’s a tool for spinning up an instance on DigitalOcean which requires very little knowledge or skill.

I’m unclear on how much it will cost to maintain the pub; a new DigitalOcean account gets $100 of credit which must be used in the first 60 days, so I’ll be running this for 60 days and I’ll tell you what it cost at the end of that.

I may even run multiple if I see some reason to or demand for them.

Tags:

#interesting #Scuttlebutt

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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transgirlkyloren:

brin-bellway:

transgirlkyloren:

I think if you’re writing porn online in this day and age and you have any sort of audience, even if you say “18+ only”, some teenagers are going to read it

(as well as some older people who for whatever reason don’t have much sexual and romantic experience)

and so part of Doing Porn Ethically is trying to make your porn something that you’d be okay with a very inexperienced person reading and drawing conclusions about sex from. and so some of that is trying to be realistic about the emotions involved with sex, about safer sex practices, about sexual ethics, and about the mechanics of sex and then when for whatever reason you don’t want to be realistic signposting ACTUALLY USING CONDOMS IS A VERY GOOD IDEA AND YOU SHOULD NOT RAPE OR ABUSE PEOPLE AND ALSO COME IS GENERALLY PRODUCED IN MUCH SMALLER QUANTITIES THAN THIS STORY CLAIMS

(I have a nagging feeling that I’ve misunderstood something here. I will tentatively post this anyway, but I might have gotten something wrong. (Although it’s also possible that the thing I’m wrong about is the sense that I’ve misunderstood something.))

—

Hmm. I’m so biased in favour of this that I can’t tell whether or not I actually agree with it on its own merits, rather than agreeing on the grounds of “I personally enjoy porn more when it’s about realistic ethical stuff, and I would like to encourage people to write their porn in a way I prefer”.

(Like…judging from context, this post was likely inspired by a post from yournaturalstate. I dislike yournaturalstate’s work primarily because it’s *unpleasant*, before even getting into any ethical considerations.)

—

I’m not sure whether this is a point in favour, or a point against, or a tangent, but it’s something related:

Mind-control porn in particular has problems with people insisting on putting blanket Do Not Try This At Home warnings on *everything*. Even things that are actually perfectly ethical and realistic. Even things that are thinly fictionalised scene logs of sex the author actually had (as an enthusiastically consenting bottom).

Written on the entrance to the largest and most well-known mind-control erotica repository are the words:

“The situations described here are at best impossible or at worst highly immoral in real life. Anyone wishing to try this stuff for real should seek psychological help and/or get a life.” (emphasis original)

(This warning is *not true*. Not in all cases.)

So personally, when I think of porn messing up impressionable teenagers, I think of teenagers being told they have to choose between being ethical (or safe) and satisfying their most deeply held desires. This dilemma is terrible enough when it *actually exists*; we *should not tell people it exists where it does not*, should not inflict that on more people than absolutely necessary.

(I say this as a former impressionable teenager falsely told her sexuality could not be safely fulfilled.)

…now that I’ve written that out, I guess this section is a point in-favour-but-with-reservations, pointing out a possible failure mode of a generally good idea. (And a failure mode the original context in question is particularly prone to, at that.)

(Well, okay, yournaturalstate specifically is not prone to it *enough*. But still, I’ve learned the hard way how easy it is to swing too far the other way.)

I think that noting which things are actually perfectly ethical and realistic is, in fact, part of having your porn be good sex ed. Misinforming people is bad sex ed. 

An excellent point. I agree.

Tags:

#the actual message of this response could probably have been conveyed just as well with a ”like” #I’m reblogging mostly so that people following me but not you can see this bit #reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #conversational aglets

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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straighttohelvetica:

Easily the most horrifying line of dialogue I’ve ever heard in an animated movie.

 

castielsunderpants:

NO BUT THIS WAS SUCH A GOOD GODDAMN MOVIE LIKE THE MUSIC IS FUN AND SUPERB THE CHARACTERS WERE REAL PEOPLE EVEN THE ANTAGONISTS THE WOMEN WERE GREAT IT WAS ALL GREAT. IT DOESNT MATTER IF YOURE JEWISH, CHRISTIAN, MUSLIM, ATHEIST, WHATEVER ELSE IT DOESNT MATTER ITS SUCH A GOOD MOVIE AND ITS LITERALLY ONLY 90 MINUTES OF YOUR DAY AND EXPERIENCE THIS HERE JUST CLICK IT LITERALLY IT WILL OPEN IN A NEW TAB GO WATCH. 

 

fifty-shadesofgay:

also can we point out that none of the characters were white? like damn accurate depictions of Biblical characters

 

riskpig:

I reblog every time Prince of Egypt comes up because holy fuck this movie is so good.

 

theparadoxymoron:

first movie i ever saw in theaters

 

comparativelysuperlative:

First movie I ever saw in theaters too! That’s probably not coincidence!

But, like, this line is part of why I grew up thinking utilitarians are monsters. And I mean that in the “check under the bed” sense—there are people who will do literally anything (depending on the circumstances) and not care if the Bible says it’s evil! And they might be coming for you!

And now of course I’m a utilitarian, and so are a lot of the people I think of as doing the most good. Turns out that genocide against a bunch of babies? Not actually a fair portrayal of people doing things for the greater good.

 

brin-bellway:

Also, I recognised this gifset as being from Prince of Egypt (through cultural osmosis; haven’t actually seen the movie), but skimmed the context, so up until “they were only slaves” I thought it was Moses talking about murdering every non-Jewish firstborn in Egypt. And I was glad that apparently somebody in the film had tried to call them out on that tactic. But no, it’s just the same-old-same-old.

See, you have no idea how much that incident scarred me as a child. You’re supposed to hear that story and empathise with the oh-poor-Jewish-slaves-who-just-want-to-be-free, but I empathised with the Egyptian peasants. My fellow firstborns, slaughtered en masse for being born to the wrong families at the wrong time. Innocent, unknowing people, who happened to meet a totally arbitrary qualification that I met.

(My parents, in a desperate attempt to console me, tried to tell me I didn’t meet the qualifications. That in their place, I’d have been one of the ones with goat’s blood painted on the doorway. Thing is, being firstborn is more important to me than being Jewish 10.5 months out of the year, and even during Christmas season, it’s not so much “Jewish” that’s important as much as “not Christian”. (The Egyptians weren’t Christian either.))

That damned story was what made me really aware, on a visceral level, of my mortality. Learning how not to be viscerally aware of mortality (apparently some people do manage to function while aware of it, but I can’t imagine how) was an extremely long, painful process. By the time I’d more or less finished, it had taken me something like a third of my lifetime-at-that-point. (Then Five for Fighting released “100 Years” and started getting it played on all the radios and even a TV commercial, and I had to spend another few months re-doing some of the painstakingly crafted mental blocks. I swear, if I ever meet the one man who comprises Five for Fighting, I’ll…well, I probably couldn’t get away with punching him. I suppose I’d tell him about how he rubbed salt in a traumatised child’s wound, and let his own guilt punish him appropriately.)

Occasionally I hear of people who laugh at the idea that the Bible isn’t suitable for children. I’m not laughing.

 

comparativelysuperlative:

Yeah, people who say that presumably haven’t actually read it.

I always thought about this from the Egyptians’ perspective, too. Except I have an older sister, and I wasn’t sure if “firstborn” here meant “firstborn son” like it sometimes does, and was I required to hope it did because I’m supposed to treat others as more important than myself.

The Prince of Egypt gets credit for portraying the mass killing as a terrible thing. The other plagues are all exciting moves in a game between God/Moses and Pharaoh, and the viewer isn’t supposed to think about the collateral damage from, say, destroying all the crops in Egypt. But in the last one the musical number ends, it shows kids dying (and parents screaming? I don’t remember) and you’re supposed to notice that this is really, really horrible. But then Pharaoh says to leave, there is much rejoicing, and the movie forgets all about it.

Also, uh, “they were only slaves” is a pretty fair paraphrase of what I learned as the Biblical justification for what God did. (The “my son” part is earlier in the chapter. New Testament quote, but it’s pretty heavily supported in the Old.) I would like to think the Prince of Egypt people did that on purpose, but they didn’t.

(And now I’m picturing Rational Draco Malfoy killing a sheep and putting blood on his door, because if the people who were immune to the last nine plagues are doing it, you don’t need to know why to copy them.)

 

responsible-reanimation:

Also, about five minutes after the events of the movie, Moses lays out the rules for owning slaves.

 

ilzolende:

Reblogged for what comparativelysuperlative​ and the people after him (including him again) said.

Especially

I’m picturing Rational Draco Malfoy killing a sheep and putting blood on
his door, because if the people who were immune to the last nine
plagues are doing it, you don’t need to know why to copy them.

(emphasis mine)

That was just great.

(Also, not that the rationalists will say this, but to anyone thinking “this is why the Abrahamic deity was way worse in the Torah than in Christian religious texts”: Judaism doesn’t seem to have a concept of hell. Genocide bad, generation of infinite disutility infinitely worse.)

…when I saw this gifset was going around again, I did not expect it to be a branch with me in it.

(I’m glad to see my contribution was a positive factor in your decision to reblog it.)

Tags:

#Prince of Egypt #death tw #I’m going to file this under #my past self has good taste #though that tag is primarily for things that I merely liked during the previous sighting and am now reblogging for the first time