conversational aglets

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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justice-turtle:

brin-bellway:

Hello from my new (well, refurbished) Dell Inspiron 15R M5110! (Wow, Dell nomenclature has gotten complicated.)

My crappy old Latitude D620 was finally starting to die of old age, so I got this one instead (for less than the D620 cost me three years ago; after researching used computer prices I’m beginning to wonder if the brick-and-mortar used computer store I bought that one from ripped me off). It arrived Monday morning, and this morning I pretty much finished setting it up how I want it. It has six gigs of RAM and a Radeon HD 6480G graphics card, and do you know what that means?

Masssss Effff—

Wait, no, I have a final exam next week to study for, plus one and a half school projects and two articles to complete by the end of the month. I don’t have time to get into a new game. (No matter how tempting justice-turtle is making Flight Rising look.)

December 1st, maybe sooner if I manage to finish early:

Masssss Effffectttt

MASS EFFEEEEEEEEECT :D

Yay for being responsible! I’ll be here to cheer you on on December 1st! :D

(Lots of rambling advice under the cut because Mass Effect yay – no spoilers here though)

Keep reading

Tags:

#(November 2014) #conversational aglets #(realised yesterday that I didn’t check my OPs) #Mass Effect #(I got a few missions in before wandering off and never really got back to it myself) #(I *did* end up getting into Flight Rising though) #(failed one of the projects because I suck at rock identification but still managed an A- overall) #(and A+ for the other course) #(but those grades are probably never going to matter because they don’t fit into an accounting degree) #(oh well‚ at least I learned stuff about rocks and computers and compensating for failures) #adventures in University Land

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slepaulica asked: is there a way i could have tagged that post that would have helped? i covered the options i could think of but if you have something in specific saviored i can try to use that in the future

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

I don’t have anything relevant saviored. You’d be surprised how rarely it comes up*, and when it does it’s usually people talking about how ill they are under readmores (so I don’t need an add-on to let me skip it). And like I said, all in all I’m glad for the warning.

*On the Internet, I mean. It comes up a lot when grocery shopping and suchlike. (Did you know Canada doesn’t have a consistent date-writing method? Good luck figuring out whether a bar of Cracker Barrel labelled “14 DE 13” is still good. (It is. Cracker Barrel writes the year first. But you can’t generalise that to non-Cracker-Barrel products.))

slepaulica said: i’m pretty sure there has to be an entrance hole for there to be bugs, but cutting them open is another good solution because more surface area for the sugar you dip them into :D

(context: ”that post”)

Tags:

#(June 2014) #conversational aglets #replies #our home and cherished land #in which Brin has a food poisoning phobia #(I generally haven’t been bothering to cut my strawberries open to check) #(just looking for holes) #(although yes one does slice them in order to marinate them in sugar for Canada Day cake)

Letters grouped according to how similar the lowercase version is to the uppercase

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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aeiously:

  • Smaller version, the ideal situation: Cc Oo Ss Uu Vv Ww Xx Zz
  • Quite similar, pretty good!: Bb Ff Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Pp Tt Yy
  • OK, I guess can see how they got that: Dd Ee Nn Qq
  • ????????: Aa Gg, Rr

 

the-real-numbers:

Ordered from worst to best

 

sigmaleph:

have you ever tried to write something case-sensitive by hand (e.g. the password to the office wifi)

lowercase-uppercase similarity Is Bad Actually

 

brin-bellway:

#idk maybe people can make their handwritten letters look different in different cases  #i cannot but my handwriting is notoriously bad

I don’t think I have much trouble with case-sensitive handwriting? At least if I’m actively trying to be clear about which case is which.

3828b2bd2cb863ebc1acdcf35bd85e7a4ca94ed3

^ a randomly-generated mixed-case string

I do often blur the distinction between f and F if I’m *not* actively trying to be clear, though.

 

sigmaleph:

yeah i can’t do that

(without a lot of effort and possibly multiple tries and honestly at that point why don’t i just text you the password)

Tags:

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

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

asexualactivities:

Catching up on the prompts from this week. Kind of long.

—

I have sex dreams, or at least, I have kink dreams. I tried to write an explanation, but I kept feeling like I was just recreating a bit from an email I wrote in August 2015. I might as well copy that here instead.

“My erotic dreams are about hive minds, mind-control magic, the occasional sedative, and, increasingly, mundane hypnosis (sometimes partnered, sometimes not). Genitals are rarely involved, and when they are they aren’t really the point. The dreams’ consent status tracks the stories I’ve been exposed to in waking life. When I was young and had only ever encountered non-con stories, I only ever had non-con dreams. Age 18 – 20, when I had a little bit of consensual stuff but mostly still had to resort to non-con, I had the occasional consensual dream but still mostly non-con. The past year, I’ve consumed mostly consensual stories, and had mostly consensual dreams. Some people are fundamentally disturbed by having rape dreams and worry what it says about them, but I’m not one of them. (Well, okay, I was at the *very* beginning, but I got over it quickly.) I prefer the consensual dreams for purely practical reasons: all else being equal, it is better to feel happy anticipation than terror at any given moment (even when I’ll be completely over the terror in twenty minutes), and when my response to figuring out what’s going to happen is to run away, about half the time I *succeed* in escaping. Wasted opportunities, those.

A few months back, I was curious how often I had erotic dreams, so I went through and counted how many were in my dream journal. I then divided this number by the number of days since I started keeping the dream journal, and came up with one day in 70. That’s the average over about 4.5 years.”

Since my libido varies with menstrual phase, I started wondering whether the frequency of erotic dreams also correlated with menstrual phase, and cross-referenced my dream journal with the menstruation marks on my calendar. Oddly, the main result was that I have erotic dreams during periods ~50% more often than I would if they were evenly distributed. (Menstruation is a “wildcard” time for me: my libido’s all over the place from period to period. I was expecting more dreams during ovulation, the consistently high-libido time, but it was only slightly higher than chance.)

Despite not “blooming”–my sexuality doesn’t seem to have changed all that much since my earliest memories, though I do understand it better now–I didn’t have my first erotic dream until I was 15. (It was about being assimilated by the Borg.)

When there are other people involved, they’re usually random NPCs, occasionally established fictional characters. (I don’t see their faces, but–being faceblind–there aren’t normally faces in my dreams anyway.) I don’t think I’ve ever had an erotic dream about real people. Sometimes I play myself, sometimes someone else.

—

I can enjoy porn, but damn is it hard to find good porn when you’re turned off by intercourse. (For extra “fun”, I’ve found myself being turned off by non-con these days too. There is consensual hypnosis porn out there, but most of it is still non-con.) I usually have to skim bits even at the best of times.

Once in a blue moon I’ll enjoy a still image, but I almost always use text-based porn. This is probably an extension of preferring text-based media in general (even non-sexual videos get overstimulating, and audios to a lesser extent), plus it’s easier to skim the squicky bits with text, or pause, or go back and savour a particularly good bit.

—

In subject matter, my fantasies are much like my dreams. I’d say their frequency and intensity varies with libido, but I pretty much *define* libido as the frequency and intensity of sexual fantasies, so that’s tautological. If I’m idly daydreaming in the background while I do other things, I won’t get turned on, but if I focus on it I usually will.

(Re: this post, I usually deal with the problem of getting bogged down in negotiation by having most or all of it happen offscreen. A lot of the problems you describe kind of sound like a mixture of not skipping over enough stuff and trying to have very visually detailed fantasies without having a detailed enough visual imagination to run them on. My visual imagination is towards the low-detail end, and I deal with this by just not having a lot of visual detail in my fantasies. There’s some visual aspects, but mostly I focus on verbal and touch/kinesthetic stuff.)

Okay, so the reason I couldn’t find that last paragraph for a context-link is because it was never on my blog at all. Fixing that.

(you’ve probably figured it out by the time you read this far, but I wrote the OP)

Tags:

#(October 2016) #conversational aglets #oh look an original post #sexuality and lack thereof #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #dreams #nsfw text

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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gasmaskaesthetic:

Boss has been at the [out of state] office since last Friday, which means that they’re printing the physical checks for our weekly AP run there. And….this is really silly, but I do miss doing that part. Printing, folding, envelope stuffing. It’s an easy, pleasant, meditative task that mentally marks the end of my week.

Silly because accounts payable is definitely the most basic and data-entry-oriented part of my job, but dammit, I like having the harder stuff punctuated with pleasingly tactile admin work!

I did a lot of secretarial stuff in high school. I was very good at it, I liked it, and I got a lot of praise for it. It’s a bit nostalgic.

 

shieldfoss:

America really is a whole other country

 

argumate:

I love doing payroll, I love the way you just have to [ presses button marked “payroll” and the machine automatically transfers the appropriate amounts electronically and emails out payslips and notifies the tax office ]

 

shieldfoss:

“Oh you guys have to press a button?”

 

shacklesburst:

Usually you do, because that way you can be sure stuff like reimbursable expenses for the month (if they were filed already) are in the system and you have the ability to delay pushing the button for a few hours if there are some last-minute changes to be made (not ideal, but happens).

Having a button also makes to possible to gather around one desk every month as a team and chant “press the button, press the button” at whomever is responsible for that action currently. And then go for drinks or smth.

 

gasmaskaesthetic:

This post wasn’t about payroll but yes

Current job is more involved than some systems I’ve seen because the accounting module sucks and was clearly just pasted on top of an otherwise mostly-functional industry-specific ERP.

Takes me 1-3 hours.

 

brin-bellway:

This is a very weird conversation to me, because among my meatspace social group the ones who get paid electronically are like “it’s a nightmare, they won’t let me log in to see my pay statements, I’m just supposed to trust that they sent me the right amount, it took me two months of complaining and escalating to superiors to even get a *tax form* out of them (and then my taxes were late)”, and the ones who get paper are like “yeah, it’s fine, it was a bit annoying at first having to go to the bank every fortnight but then I learned how to use mobile cheque deposit”.

(I know that you guys are taking the perspective of the one sending out the payments rather than the one receiving them, but still.)

 

gasmaskaesthetic:

Current company issues physical paystubs as backup for the direct deposit amount, and my side business uses QuickBooks payroll, which lets you log in to see your paycheck.

Even when I worked for the state, I got a physical pay stub.

And the job after that had an (admittedly painful to use) portal that you could log in to to see your statements.

 

brin-bellway:

I think with the most recent tale of woe (two days ago, friend who works for a mid-tier Canadian grocery chain), in *theory* she was supposed to be able to log in to see her pay statements, but the portal wouldn’t accept her login credentials and nobody would fix it.

(It may be worth noting that out of the dozens of jobs various friends have had over the twelve years I’ve been here, *very* few even *tried* to obey labour laws. I think that at the moment, I’m the only person I know IRL (not counting coworkers, of course) who actually gets meal breaks.)

 

cromulentenough:

The solution to employers making it difficult to get pay statements is not…keep on using physical cheques in the year of our lord 2019.

 

gasmaskaesthetic:

You tagged it #wtf America but I think @brin-bellway is canadian

 

cromulentenough:

Huh. Interesting. I didn’t know Canada still used cheques like that. Ive heard a Canadian talking about how they never carry cash and just use their card everywhere, which I can’t get away with even in London so I thought Canada would be even further along than us with that kinda stuff.

 

brin-bellway:

Yep, I’m in Canada, and as such so are my meatspace social groups.

—

I’m not so sure that “widespread use of electronic paycheques” and “being able to make all consumer purchases with a card” are sufficiently similar things that any society with one can be assumed to have the other.

—

Whether you can get away with not carrying cash here depends on your lifestyle and risk tolerance. I work in fast food, and every once in a while the card-reader part of the system will break or glitch, and usually at least two people per outage will have to leave because without a card reader they can’t pay. A while back someone had her credit card declined and didn’t have anything else on her, and ended up abandoning the food we’d already made. (The assistant manager told me I might as well keep it, and I brought it home and fed it to Mom. (It was not a food I personally like.))

((Although to be fair, I think part of the problem in that last case was that she was embarrassed by the decline and fled. She was holding a smartphone in her other hand, and given twenty seconds to think over the options we might have been able to arrange some smartphone-mediated payment method. It would have been worth a shot, at least.))

—

We don’t have pennies here anymore and instead round cash (and only cash) transactions to the nearest 5c, which (perhaps unintentionally) actually gives you an *incentive* to use cash in some edge cases. Like, if you buy something that’s 52c and give them two quarters, you’ve gotten almost a 4% discount, better than what you’d get from credit-card cashback. I often pay cash when buying from my own workplace for this reason.

(before you ask “since when does *anything* these days cost only 52c”: the employee discount is quite large, and some of our items are quite small)

—

Note that while I routinely *receive* cheques (just got one today, in fact), I literally never *write* them. I don’t even own any.

I won a small scholarship a while ago and they wanted a void cheque in order to send me the money (it was *not* the kind where the money goes directly to the school), and I went to the bank and asked about it. The teller told me that a: cheques are extremely expensive for the lower-tier account that I have (like $50 a pack, I think she said?), and b: there’s no need for a void cheque to literally be a cheque these days, here, have a pre-authorized debit form. (The scholarship people accepted it, and so did the bank I later opened a savings account with that wanted to see a cheque in order to do cross-bank account linking.)

 

cromulentenough:

Ah ok, ‘occasionally receive cheques but never write them’ is closer to my experience too, although I don’t know anyone who gets paid for their job by cheque.

I also got a cheque for a scholarship type thing so it is still around very occasionally here.

(see also this other branch)

Tags:

#conversational aglets #adventures in human capitalism #our home and cherished land #adventures in University Land #in which Brin has a job #long post #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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gasmaskaesthetic:

brin-bellway:

gasmaskaesthetic:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

—

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

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

The bit about fear is really interesting! I tend to believe that I’ll be better able to handle whatever I’m afraid of if I’m not experiencing the physical symptoms of fear.

Tags:

#(September 2018) #conversational aglets #not sure why I didn’t get this one during the first pass #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #violence cw #anger management

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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no-chill-at-all:

 

ablackgirldaydreaming:

Yea

 

tittytaytay:

same

 

ms-splendiferous:

load up the playlist and spend the days writing and…praying

 

cheshiretiffy:

Let’s see…. 6 months of quiet and beautiful scenery to earn more money than anyone in the history of my family has ever seen?

Gee…

 

justice-turtle:

is food delivered? do I have access to my meds? can I bring friends? is there cell phone service in emergencies (eg I fall off a scenic cliff)? are there any social opportunities in meatspace or am I just in solitary for six months? what sort of library does the house have? can I leave to go shopping, or do I have to order shit like shampoo and craft supplies delivered too? are my living expenses coming out of the million dollars, who’s paying for them?

*always gets tied up in the logistics of that sort of thing* (also people go literally crazy without human contact for extended periods)

 

brin-bellway:

Everything JT said (except I’m not on meds). Additionally, you said no internet and TV. Does that mean I can have a computer as long as it has no internet access? If so, how much preparation time do I have to stock this computer with entertainment supplies? (Can I use external hard drives for more space?) Does non-streaming video count as TV? If videos still count as TV even when locally stored, is that all videos, or just videos that have also aired on television networks? (I’m pretty okay with no video at all for six months, but I’m asking anyway on principle.)

And JT, why limit cell phone service to emergencies? Limit data service to emergencies, sure, but technically nobody said anything about not being able to call people. (I’m less sure about texting, since as we learned recently texting is, for most practical purposes, the same thing as email.)

Also, 1 million what?

 

justice-turtle:

Well, I was figuring non-emergency phone service would probably be landline, in keeping with the last-century feel of the challenge. There’d have to be something of the sort if we were supposed to stay in or near the house and couldn’t use the internet to order food/shampoo/etc. (If we had a car and were allowed to go into town for shopping, social meetups, etc, a phone might be less necessary, although since I’m always googling the hours of places, a phone and up-to-date phone book would probably still be needed to *set up* meetups, shopping, etc.)

And yeah, 1 million what? If it was buttons, rupees, or pieces of landscaping gravel, it might not be nearly as valuable as it sounds if we assume dollars; if it was British pounds, gold ingots, or tons of weapons-grade uranium, then assuming the ability to convert it to a usable local currency, it could be considerably more valuable.

A computer with no internet access would probably be allowed – at least, I bet a lot of the people talking about writing are thinking in those terms (I sure as hell ain’t writing longhand for six months) – and would be hella useful for writing, or indeed transcribing if I downloaded all current episodes of the podcast ahead of time; my guess would be that all video counts as “TV” and is therefore disallowed.

It’d be more work than sucking a dick for a billion dollars or getting shot in the leg for ten million, apropos of other similar “challenges”, but if living expenses are paid it could be a nice change. ^_^

 

stealthbaguette:

OBVIOUSLY YOU’LL BE REWARDED ONE MILLION INTERNETS AS YOU’VE BEEN DEPRIVED OF THE INTERNETS WHILE IN THERE.

Tags:

#(May 2016) #conversational aglets #fun with loopholes #(stumbled across this one today)

allamaraine asked: Kira + art

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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little-brisk:

brin-bellway:

little-brisk:

The first two things that come to mind:

  • a flock of flightless birds
  • once i wrote a story in which kira shoots a fresco

So we are more or less doomed, here. I haven’t thought about this much before, but here are my impressions at a first attempt.

Art for Kira is, first, about ruin. About damage, and loss. That is what violent occupations do to art. This is her first concept of art: stolen paintings and sculptures, damaged buildings, a campaign of disinformation about Bajoran achievements in the arts.

Then art must be, later, about recovery, about salvage. What can be restored, recovered, unburied.

Kira doesn’t have much in the way of an aesthetic sensibility, or at least that’s what she would claim. She forms strong attachments to art objects, and articulating why, or what it is about the object’s aesthetic features that draws her to it, is less interesting to her than the fact of the object and the fact of her attachment.

Perhaps she begins with a disdain for ‘pure decoration,’ prizing only art that has a use: prayer mandalas, for example. But perhaps with time she starts to see that the useful/decorative binary doesn’t hold up. What if something is useful because of the feeling it provokes? What if, like her prayer mandala, a useful object is also decorative? These simple questions occur to her relatively late in life, and the result is that she develops a reverence for the very fact of objects that provoke them.

She will never be a collector, but she will learn that to stand before a beautiful thing in contemplation of it is a worthwhile act – and it is an act that demands that the work of art be referred to itself, and not to any gesture of possession or mastery. She will for this reason prefer museums to private possessions, and temples to museums.

That act of contemplation is itself an act of recovery, of restoration and unburial. And for this reason, she will work hard to see that Bajor’s art finds public homes, that art objects are returned to the places that first housed them, and that any space – a temple, a museum, a library archive – devoted to art objects will be freely accessible to anyone, so that those recuperative acts of contemplation belong to anyone, to everyone.

This is a good post, I like this post, the fic you actually linked is new to me and looks interesting, but I would also like to know what fic you intended to link. It doesn’t look to be this one, what with the “Oparu” in the author’s-name section.

Damn! Thanks for pointing that out, Brin. This is the story I meant.

Athough obviously you should all also read Opal’s TNG/VOY mirrorverse story, ’Shards and Fairytales,’ which was in my copypaste because I was reccing it to someone!

Tags:

#(January 2014) #I forgot to tag my response with ”reply via reblog” #so I didn’t catch this when looking through that tag for threads to aglet #but I’m formatting this post on my WordPress mirror right now and realised what was missing #conversational aglets #Star Trek #DS9 #recs

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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gasmaskaesthetic:

brin-bellway:

gasmaskaesthetic:

honeywives:

people who slander dandelions are so boring. oh you don’t like weeds?? you don’t want to see my yard absolutely covered in fairy pom moms motherfucker??? get bent 

as a small child I used to argue vehemently that dandelions weren’t weeds, because “weeds are plants you DON’T want!”

I know, right?!

On the bright side, nobody else caring about “”weeds”” means they don’t mind if you pick them and make a beautiful bouquet for your mommy. Or try to see if you can figure out this “flower crown” concept you’ve vaguely heard about. Or dissect them and test their various liquids on a piece of tree bark to see if any of them dye it an interesting colour.

(*Looking* at flowers is one of the most boring things to do with them, and it’s a shame that roses and the like are reserved for such boring purposes.)

You, you get me.

Tags:

#dandelion #flowers #my childhood #conversational aglets

mkfshard asked: I've recently begun reading Pact, after finishing Worm, mostly because of yours and others' recommendations! Do you have any other reading recommendations past wildbow, be it serial novels or full-on publications? :D

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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minitiate:

itsbenedict:

brin-bellway:

brin-bellway:

itsbenedict:

Ooh, hm. If you liked Worm, you’d probably also like @walterlw​‘s The Fifth Defiance, which is in the same vein of realistic and/or clever superhero worldbuilding and has some great characters. Uh, what else, though, going off knowing you liked Worm, and also I know you were into Homestuck back in the day… hm. 

  • nostalgebraist’s The Northern Caves is a fun sort of psychological horror-y thing told through mocked-up message board posts, plus his other stuff (Almost Nowhere, freaky sci-fi psychodrama involving weird time shit, and Floornight, his previous freaky sci-fi psychodrama involving weird time shit) is great. 
  • Do you like Danganronpa? KinuNishimura has a really good fanganronpa called Operation V.K. that goes in its own direction and does some cool shit with robots. 
  • I was about to recommend Floating Point by Stefan Gagne, which is this thing about like, the internet as a self-contained world inhabited by digital people who have no idea a real world ever existed, but for some reason his site is impossible to find- I don’t know if he took it down to sell the physical books directly or what.
  • I wrote some stuff, but you’ve been following me for a while so I figure you probably already know about Cordyceps and my Overwatch fic.
  • The Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer is pretty cool- really elaborate sci-fi worldbuilding for a future Earth where high-speed transportation has rendered geographical nations obsolete, which really gets into the wild political ramifications of everything.
  • One thing I relate to very much like I relate to Homestuck- in that it was super formative for me and remains really funny and compelling and I continue to recommend it, despite a lackluster ending, being kind of off-putting and hard to get into at the beginning, and most people who were really into it back in the day claiming to have outgrown it- is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Say what you will about it being didactic or unrealistic or condescending or whatever, but that shit is still fun.

*

I’m partway through Floating Point and the website still seems to be working fine for me [link].

(I was worried for a moment there when you said that, but then I remembered I kept local copies of those pages, so even if it *had* gone down I could make do)

Oh, thanks! It was down when I went to check, and even now it seems like the CSS isn’t loading right, but I guess that was just some temporary hosting issue. Whew!

Oh thank goodness, I haven’t read floating point in ages but was briefly worried that I may have missed my chance

Tags:

#conversational aglets #recs #Floating Point #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers