conversational aglets

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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rustingbridges:

I’m reading a blog post, and this guy is talking about what he does at canadian thanksgiving

is that how canadians refer to canadian thanksgiving? “happy canadian thanksgiving!” “give canadian thanks!”

 

brin-bellway:

#I mean probably not  #probably this is just because most of his blog audience is american  #and probably he gets a lot of confused questions about his thanksgiving timing  #but maybe

 

Yeah, it’s only “Canadian Thanksgiving” in contexts where the default assumption is American. Likewise, “American Thanksgiving” in contexts where the default assumption is Canadian.

Mom has been known to call the American one “Pilgrim Thanksgiving”, but I think she’s been doing that less lately.

(We celebrate both, in honor of our American heritage. I don’t know how Canadian-only people are supposed to cope with the fact that one can of pumpkin makes two pies: we get to just make both Thanksgivings’ pumpkin pies at once, keeping the second one in the freezer until it’s time.)

 

maryellencarter:

…in my experience one can of pumpkin makes one pie. I don’t know if your cans are larger, your pies smaller, or your recipes more padded with non-pumpkin ingredients, but now I’m curious.

 

brin-bellway:

I’ll go look that up.

1. Our spare can of pumpkin is 796mL. According to a grocery-store online catalogue you can also get “pumpkin pie filling” in 540mL cans, but we only buy that by accident.

2. The pie in our freezer is 9 inches in diameter and maybe an inch and a half deep.

3. The can says:

“Pumpkin pie recipe on reverse. Requires: eggs, brown sugar, ground cinnamon, ground nutmeg, ground ginger, salt, 175 mL evaporated milk (1 pie) and an unbaked pie shell.

1 can makes 2 pies.”

When I asked Mom for confirmation that we do in fact use the recipe on the can, she said yes, then asked for context (which I gave). She thinks the main difference is the can size, with a side of having to add more ingredients to the plain pumpkin.

—

@alarajrogers said:

“The solution for Americans is we eat 2 pumpkin pies.”

Come to think of it I suppose that *would* work pretty well for groups with more than 2 – 3 pie-eating members (edit: or maybe even just people who aren’t also making chocolate cream pie). Maybe the canned-pumpkin manufacturers size their cans assuming you’re going to invite people over.

 

maryellencarter:

Same recipe, same size pie, about twice as large of a can. Interesting. The cans of pumpkin I recall from my childhood, which made one pie each and had that same recipe (with the addition of allspice) on the back, were somewhere between 440mL and 475mL.

(see also)

Tags:

#food #Thanksgiving #our home and cherished land #home of the brave #conversational aglets

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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overlordtulip:

Apparently most people don’t have the thing I have where my non-dominant hand is stronger than my dominant hand. Throughout my life, I’ve always found the intuitive distribution of labor, hand-use-wise, to involve using my right hand for any task which involves precise movements or quick reaction times (writing, mouse-movement, fencing, et cetera), and my left for any task which involves brute force and can afford to sacrifice precision (opening tightly-closed bottles and jars and heavy doors and so forth, probably some other categories of tasks I’m forgetting right now).

I wonder if this is related to the thing where, despite doing most two-handed activities in the prototypically right-handed fashion, I’ve always done minigolf and baseball batting in the prototypically left-handed fashion.

 

brin-bellway:

I wonder how common this is. All I really know about it is that I have the thing and my mom does not. (I found out when she expressed surprise at me opening jars with my left hand.)

I’ve never played baseball; I am not sure how I hold a mini-golf club, or for that matter what the prototypically right/left-handed fashions of mini-golfing would be.

 

rustingbridges:

I mean I also open jars and so on with left hand, but I think it’s just because I typically hold jars and bottles with my right. I know my right has a stronger grip.

I’ve been trying to teach myself to do things like that with my left hand, so I can intuitively have my right open for more important tasks, but it’s kinda hard to remember.

 

poipoipoi-2016:

Yeah, that feels about right to me. 

Also, my left shoulder is about twice the size of my right one, and if doing literally any shoulder work in the gym didn’t instantly result in injury, I’d probably spend some time/effort on that.

Tags:

#conversational aglets #handedness #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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rustingbridges:

brin-bellway:

femmenietzsche:

I’m grateful that the ability to call people bitches has survived wokeness more or less unscathed. I figured it would, but you can never be 100% sure about these things

…it has?

I mean I guess under a model where it’s important that swearwords be *transgressive*–and where (somewhat) greater acceptance of swearing has thus made them less potent–one could argue that wokeness has *encouraged* “bitch” by shoring up its transgressiveness. But to me it definitely feels like it’s in that transgressive-but-not-totally-beyond-the-pale zone, and for primarily SJ reasons.

(Noticeably further into the zone than calling something “insane”, likely because of the remaining force of the obscenity. I might use “insane” colloquially after some hesitation or if my emotions were running high, but would probably not use “bitch”.)

intragender bitch seems to have survived, intergender seems fairly dicey at present

Tags:

#language #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #conversational aglets

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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itsmaledict:

brin-bellway:

thisismycursed3rdblog:

My favorite trope

Strangers TO friends TO enemies TO we have to work together so we can survive TO this relationship is a complex thing that even though they should hate each other and have tried to kill one another they are drawn to each other in a way they can’t fully understand TO friends again TO lovers

@itsmaledict is this Umineko

 

(I’ve been reading it on your recommendation, am currently early in episode 6; pretty good but *damn* are these people fucked up)

no no, Umineko is friends TO strangers TO enemies TO rivals TO we have to work together so we can survive TO gotcha, enemies again TO rivals TO murder rivals TO oh my god why are these lesbians trolling us TO lover TO lovers TO murder lovers

Tags:

#fair #and thanks for the luck I think I’m going to need it #Umineko #conversational aglets

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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typhlonectes:

Tiburon Collared Lizard (Crotaphytus dickersoni) male, endemic to Western Mexico

photograph by Dick Bartlett

 

brin-bellway:

@lizardywizard, what do you think of the colour?

 

lizardywizard:

i was totally about to reblog this gushing about how gorgeous and then i saw that you tagged me!

there is (afaics on mobile) a teeeeensy bit too much green in the blue to be Actually Me but otherwise very acceptable, 9/10 for accuracy but 12.65/10 for Just Plain Gorgeous. like seriously those markings are The Latest Chic and if they’re not then you me and the Fasiion Industry have got some Talkems to’do

 

lizardywizard:

honestly on further examination I like the head shape Rather A Lot and the transition from turquoise into yellow around the jawline is A+. i have always liked that kind of colour pattern (upper body and upper jaw one colour/belly and lower jaw another colour) but wouldn’t have thought of this colour combo, it’s actually unexpectedly aesthetic.

also he is a very nice example of nature doing a sparkledog well. lots of busy complex patterns but it never looks like too much.

a lesson we can all learn from. I want Draw Him

#i like this lizard rather a lot  #please feel free to ask for Reptile Reviews any time

Tags:

#(June 2016) #conversational aglets #lizard

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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onyxofborg:

alarajrogers:

brin-bellway:

I’m cleaning out my notepad program in preparation for a move to a new† laptop††, and I found this Tumblr draft dated March 10th, 2016.

—

One of the worst non-obvious things about prosopagnosia is that it *reduces the amount of serendipity in your life*.

All else equal, I have far fewer chance meetings with old friends and colleagues than a non-faceblind person would. I have witnessed my mother having chance meetings that I would not have had in her place. I abandoned Orphan Black partway through the first episode because it disturbed me too much, knowing that if they’d based the clones’ on *my* genetic structure instead of hers, the entire show would never have happened. Sarah and Beth would have walked right by each other and never known. How many plot hooks (let alone easter eggs) have I missed out on in my own personal narrative?

(I went bowling on my 22nd birthday. In the group playing on the lane next to my family, there was a girl who looked just like I would if I didn’t wear glasses. I assume it was a coincidence. I assume she was not a secret clone or long-lost twin. If I am wrong in that assumption, I will never find out. If one day I passed someone I assumed to be a stranger, and they were actually a former acquaintance who would have given me some life-changing piece of information had I struck up a conversation with them like old times, I will never find out. Almost certainly, I have at the very least passed by acquaintances who would have given me non-life-*changing* but life-*enhancing* pieces of information, had I only known it was them.)

(This post inspired by CORDYCEPS [link], another story whose plot is dependant on one person recognising another’s face. I like the mystery and I like Benedict’s writing, so I’ve been reading it anyway for now.)

—

†And by “new”, I mean “seven years old, but significantly higher-spec than my current seven-year-old laptop”. Dad’s laptop broke, so we agreed that I would buy a “new” one for me and hand my old one down to him. Back in the day, *I* used to get *his* hand-me-down computers, but my computer requirements have now outpaced his (fortunately not to the point where my usual laptop budget of ~USD$300 is an insufficient amount of money), so.

††My backups are generally pretty thorough, and it wouldn’t have been a disaster data-wise if I’d woken up this morning to find my laptop permanently unable to boot (which did happen to me one morning in my mid-teens! no warning, no particular reason AFAIK why that motherboard chose that night to fail, it just did!), but I’ve found a couple overlooked spots.

Yeah, I find that plots that depend on recognizing people’s faces under extreme conditions are so weird to me. Like… humans can do that? Really? You saw this guy one time on the news and now you run into him in real life and you know who he is? Just because his face was shown on the news once? How is that even possible? I often question the legitimacy of such plot points even though I know my personal experience is not normal for human beings, because it just seems so completely implausible. Meanwhile, here I am not recognizing my own daughter when I drive past her on the street. (Or worse, walking up to her guests at her birthday party and addressing them as if they’re her.)

Honestly, I’ve never wondered how people could not realize Clark Kent was Superman. Take your glasses off and wear tights and a cape, and I wouldn’t recognize you either. Also I’d be too busy staring at the cape because WHEE CAPE! :P

One thing I find unrealistic about stories is when someone is telling someone else about a conversation they had and they remember everything WORD FOR WORD, in the exact order that it happened. If it was me, I’d be like “and then we talked about penguins for a while, and then he told me this story about…oh wait, before that, he told me someone broke into his office and moved a bunch of stuff around!” I’d make a horrible detective.

Tags:

#(June 2018) #conversational aglets #prosopagnosia #embarrassment squick #amnesia cw #cordyceps tcftog #Superman

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

brin-bellway:

Okay, we were talking and got curious, so I’m going to post this sample and ask for your input.

From what you can hear in this recording, where do you think this person is from?

(Apologies for poor audio quality.)

@injygo replied: ‘instinctively, I think “lives in Minnesota but family is Irish”’

Huh, interesting. That is not any of the answers I was expecting.

(Everyone else: please submit a guess first before reading below the cut, as there are spoilers.)

Keep reading

justice-turtle said: I couldn’t understand enough of the words to venture an opinion on the accent (probably a combination of poor audio quality and my known auditory processing troubles), but knowing you’re interested in the weird ways brains work, it might be relevant to note that the *tune* was immediately and obviously Irish to me (having scrolled down and seen that it’s Phil Collins, that makes sense), and that once I caught the line “we came from the north and we came from the south”, my brain decided (cont’d)

justice-turtle said: (cont’d) decided that was an extremely Canadian-folk-specific line and therefore you must be the singer. (I have no idea what song this is and therefore whether that assessment is true, though I assume I could google the line.) I don’t know if *you* actually sounded more Canadian once I decided that or whether my brain was just doing brain shit, but I’d suspect the latter on principle.

Tags:

#(February 2018) #conversational aglets #replies #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #accents #home of the brave #our home and cherished land #(it is not a folk song: he wrote it himself)

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

Also, I have acquired a new appreciation for AO3’s download function, which is great at facilitating archiving.

And I have acquired a new opposite-of-appreciation for fanfiction.net, which goes so far the other direction that you are *not allowed to copy text from a fic*. I did a couple of small fics by *going into the page source*, finding the fic *there*, pasting it into a LibreOffice document, and *manually replacing the br tags with line breaks* (there was probably some way to automate that last bit). Then I hit upon the solution of simply saving the entire page as an HTML file, which seems to have worked. Good: I was not looking forward to manually inserting line breaks in Chanson de Geste.

 

serinemolecule:

https://alanhogan.com/code/text-selection-bookmarklet

is what I personally use to copy/paste things from sites that don’t want me to. It doesn’t work on all sites, but it works on a lot of them.

 

brin-bellway:

Ooh, this looks promising. Thank you!

 

mugasofer:

I use http://ficsave.xyz when I want to download a fic off fanfiction.net

 

eclairsandsins:

You could also use a text editor like sublime

Tags:

#(OP from January 2018; responses from May 2018) #conversational aglets #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #the more you know #(I don’t think I’ve come across any opportunities to use these since then)

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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somnilogical:

brin-bellway:

The official Times Square livestream crashed at 11:59:50, presumably overwhelmed by all the viewers.

The version of Auld Lang Syne Mom picked out was screechy and failed to have a Scottish accent.

That one Scottish guy came through, as he has every year.

I try not to read prophetic symbolism into things, but this reads as “some rough patches (mostly poverty-related), but things will work out okay in the end”. I suppose that’s not so bad.

Happy New Year, everyone!

happy new year

i didnt catch on until now that the central question of auld lang syne was rhetorical. i didnt pay too much attention to it, but tacitly assumed that the song had a similar intent as a section of the opening music of revolutionary girl utena:

Take my revolution. Let’s go on with our lives.
Reality approaches now, frantically.
What I want is to find my place in life and my self-worth,
taking who I’ve been up until today…

…and heroically stripping her down until she’s bare,
like the roses whirling in freedom.
But even if the two of us should be separated,
I will change the world.

that is, if everyone you know leaves you and you have amnesia and forget that they ever existed, you can still exist and do good things in the new year

i think i also kind of bundled this with a generalized category of being lost

lost: erasing {people that know you, memory, ‘sense of self’}

and being able to {find out, work on} what you value regardless

–

i think this notion was reinforced by

And we’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

i didnt know that auld lang syne was used to communicate ‘times long past‘ and my mind constructed a ritual in which humans collectively would drink something to induce amnesia and kindness towards each other. kind of how alcohol sometimes works

–

i want to be able to witness the birth of these hallucinations; my brain is such that high [complexity/(seed evidence)] worlds appear often and i dont have a ~systemic practice to differentiate them from hallucinations entangled with more magic reality fluid

Tags:

#(January 2018) #conversational aglets #New Years #amnesia cw #unreality cw?

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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kaylin881:

brin-bellway:

I would like to thank @kaylin881 for providing all the fun of stalking people on the Internet without the ethical issues.

(spoilers regarding Kaylin’s Amenta characters follow)

Keep reading

Eeeeeeeee! This is delightful! I’m so glad you were interested enough to look into this. 

You’re right, and this information has been discussed OOC on the amenta discord chat. It’ll be revealed IC at the same time Cat finally reveals his caste. For now, you just get a little bonus enjoyment. 

And, no, I didn’t add that tag to make comparisons easier. I added it because both of them are the sort of person who would have a tag for that.

Tags:

#(November 2017) #conversational aglets #Amenta