Brinens and Things &#8211; Tumblr Mirror

Quick poll:

What numerical range can legitimately be described by the word “several”?

@squareallworthy yes, in my usage.

squareallworthy:

5 to somewhere in the high teens.

You are an outlier. Consensus is 3-6, with some people including 2 or 7 (but not both).

I’m 3-7.

eightyonekilograms:

Related poll: what time period is covered by “the other day”? (If you wouldn’t mind, please add your approximate or exact age as well; I have a working hypothesis that “the other day” spans greater stretches of time as one gets older)

42. At least two days ago, but not long enough ago that I could say “last week”.

counter-example:

several = 4-9

the other day = within the last year-ish but sometimes longer

Good lord, that is almost as bad as how Mrs. Porcupine uses “it’s been a minute”.

eightyonekilograms:

Heh, my dad and I would drive you crazy.

My dad uses “the other day” to mean basically any point in the past. He has used it to refer to events more than 8 years ago. It used to drive me up the wall when I was young, but now I find myself doing exactly the same thing.

Hypothesis falsified; I guess my dad is just weird and it rubbed off on me.

Several = definitely 4 – 8, maybe 9 or 10

The other day = if I knew how long ago it was I probably wouldn’t be calling it that; likely not more than a couple weeks or so though, after that it defaults back to “a while ago” which could be any temporal distance

Age = 26

Tags:

#reply via reblog #surveys #time #language #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

September 13, 2020September 26, 2020 ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

hip-shop:

hot new tumblr discourse

put in the tags your opinions on wearing shoes in the house and why

Tags:

#in my own house: nothing against it unless the shoes are in quarantine‚ but I normally don’t #in other people’s houses: I’m not willing to die on this hill so I go along with the taking-your-shoes-off norm #but I would rather keep them on #taking off one’s shoes is an expression of vulnerability #(partly Touching Their Floor and partly Making It More Difficult to Leave Abruptly) #and it’s frankly presumptuous that everybody and their brother demands it of me #this is *your* space‚ not mine‚ and the fact is that I will not be as comfortable here as I would at home #what next? #are you going to expect me to eat your finger foods without hand sanitiser? #groom my face?? #take off my utility belt??? #we play this game of pretending to trust each other #but I don’t trust your house and I don’t trust you #you want my trust‚ fucking earn it #tag rambles #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #illness mention

September 4, 2020September 7, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

maryellencarter:

so like. there’s this budgeting thing called the 50/30/20 method. apparently it is popularized by elizabeth warren? the idea is you spend only 50% of your budget on needs, 30% on wants, and 20% on savings or debt reduction (after counting all minimum payments on your current debt as part of Needs).

So I know my bills take up more than one of my 2 paychecks a month. (I ignore the occasional third one for budgeting purposes till it rolls around, so I don’t overbudget for months that don’t have one.) So for curiosity’s sake, I broke down my entire budget into Needs, Wants, and Savings, then did percentage math at it.

For this purpose, you count your non-tax payroll deductions, like healthcare and 401(k) contributions, as part of your income and expenses, but you don’t count money that goes away as taxes. So the budget starts off with putting 401(k) contributions in Savings and healthcare deductions in Needs. Then you start listing off shit like rent, utilities, car expenses…

Right now, while I’m still catching up on a bunch of my COVID-deferred bills and loans, my Needs come out to about 74% of my income. However, my Wants are very minimal: I have my massage subscription and tip, I’ve budgeted for fast food or takeout maybe 2-3x a month, and I pledge to one Patreon at the $1 level. All together, my Wants are about 6% of my income, leaving the requisite 20% to go toward reducing COVID debt for now.

However, once my COVID deferrals are all paid off, my Needs go down to about 67% of my income – and this is with generous projections, like at least one specialist copay every single month and gasoline if we ever start driving again. My Wants stay at about 6%. So I could either use the other 27% for savings and debt reduction, or I could stick with the recommended 20% and have 13% of my budget for Wants.

And I’m like… this is so much money. This is $150 just unallocated *after* going out to eat at least once a month and keeping my massage subscription. That’s… I do not know what else I would want. I could buy my entire wardrobe at LL Bean. I could have a massage every single week. I could eat at a sit-down restaurant every week. I could buy the newest and most expensive iPhone every single year. I could buy a brand new American Girl doll every month with money to spare. Like I couldn’t do all of those at *once* obviously, but that’s with just 7% of my income by this method of reckoning.

Like, if I somehow did make twice my Needs expenses after tax. That’s not impossible; I’d have to make a little under $33k a year, or a little over $2700 a month, which would be about $17 an hour excluding taxes. I don’t expect to get there at my current job in the near future, but it’s not astronomical.

But like, at that point I’d be saving about $545 a month, covering all my Needs expenses, and I would have *over eight hundred dollars a fucking month* to spend on Wants! Like… jesus fuckwaffles. How would I… I could buy a new one of my current phone every single month and have money left over. I could go to one of those black-tie restaurants that are like $100 a plate *twice a week*. I could not only move into a bigger apartment but hire a maid service to clean it. I could buy every single book I’ve ever read in short order and pay to store them all. I could live on like… caviar and avocado toast.

Hell, even if my living expenses were somehow miraculously reduced and my Needs were only half of my tax-excluded pay *now*, I’d be living on a little over $1000 a month, saving about $400 a month, and trying to figure out how to spend $600 a month on Wants. How… I don’t fucking know what else I could want. I’m not used to having money to spare. It’s weirder than winning the lottery, even, because it’s just like… it’s not enough to go “I will pay off all my friends’ student loans and buy a condo!” but it’s enough that I’m like “Do I just… put all 27% of my income in savings? Do I save for a car? Pay off my student loans? Invest for retirement? Am I fundamentally missing something I should be wanting?”

That sounds like a sign that 50/30/20 isn’t for you.

A lot of budgeting methods have this…maybe not “problem” exactly, but this thing where they’re clearly aimed at people who start with an entertainment budget of “everything after necessities” (or in many cases even higher) and negotiate *downwards*, which makes the methods a bad fit for people who start with an entertainment budget of zero and negotiate *upwards*. I guess the people spending money they don’t have on things they could do without are the ones most in need of frameworks, so the frameworks are designed for them. Getting *down* to 30% is a good start for people who were previously spending *more*.

—

Personally, I do struggle to wrap my head around things that draw a bright line between “wants” and “investments”. Sure, there are *occasional* items–like restaurant food–that are just wants and not also investments, but by far the most common reason for me to want to buy something is because I think it will leave me better off in the long run. I have a long list of things to save up for, and it’s all stuff like “house repairs” and “things that give you a leg up on Vimes Boot Theory” and “retirement funds” and “hedging against the future being wildly different from the present, such that normal retirement funds don’t cut it [link]”.

—

I think it’s important to bear in mind: given how weird your life is in general, and in particular the fact that your ability to work has a history of fluctuating erratically, saving is even more important for you than for most people.

There’s a concept called “self-insurance”. (…actually it turns out that there are at least *two* similar-but-not-identical concepts called self-insurance, and the Wikipedia article is about the wrong one. Investopedia [link] has the right idea.) You, in particular, *really* should get disability insurance if you can possibly manage it, and while third-party disability-insurance companies *exist*, you’d have to file claims (during the periods of time when you are least capable of filing claims!), and take the risk that whatever shit happens to you next won’t technically be disability by their standards, and operate under rules designed to let the insurance company turn a profit. (The house always wins.) Ideally, then, what you’d want is to instead save up enough in the good times that you can cover the bad times yourself.

(For example: you mention you’re digging your way out of COVID-related debt. My brother was temporarily laid off in the spring, and because of [glitches in the hastily-expanded Canadian welfare system] was unable to receive any kind of unemployment payments in time to actually help him with it. But he had lots of money in his savings account, and he used some of *that* to cover his bills until the restaurant re-opened. Now that he’s working again, he’s replenishing it; in the long run, he plans to save up enough for a condo.

(We not-quite-joked that if the glitch had to happen to *someone* at his workplace, it’s good that it happened to him: his co-workers spend all their money on booze and weed and wouldn’t have been able to handle it. His co-workers, meanwhile, not-quite-joke that they should get him hooked on something so they can drag him back into the crab bucket.))

Tags:

#reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #covid19 #illness mention #drugs cw #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

August 31, 2020September 3, 2020 ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

“rustingbridges: brin-bellway: rustingbridges: rustingbridges: I…”

voxette-vk:

mathemagicalschema:

okay I keep wondering: when you take OTC pain meds like acetaminophen or ibuprofen for ordinary aches and pains – a headache, joint pain, whatever – do you actually notice a difference? Can you consciously tell that your pain is lower after you’ve taken them? Because I never have, even taking acetaminophen plus whatever NSAID at inadvisably high doses. It’s conceivable that I could find an effect if I kept a spreadsheet logging my pain levels before and after dosing – do they really have a stronger effect than that for most people? I’ve been on some prescription NSAIDs before and had about the same experience.

my options for noticeably-helpful pain management basically start with heat/ice and then jump right up to weed or opioids, which kind of sucks. temperature-based solutions are not terribly portable (icy-hot et. al. is far more unpleasant to me than any pain it might help with), and weed/opioids might make me feel better but don’t, generally, leave me any more functional. Voltaren gel works, kinda, in the area where it’s applied, for a couple minutes? and anyway, you can’t get it OTC in the States.

How likely is it that I have some sort of fucked-up drug metabolism thing?

They work for me

I usually stop noticing as much discomfort when I take OTC meds for headaches or w/e, but then it usually takes some effort to start noticing those pains in the first place, so while I think they help I’m not super confident

Ibuprofen does approximately nothing for me, but a couple years ago my doctor prescribed me extra-strength naproxen for late-onset dysmenorrhea and it turns out naproxen *does* work. (And it makes periods lighter, too!)

In fact, just two days ago I had this thought process:

Me: “Huh, the pain in my heel is almost completely gone today. I wonder if that splinter I couldn’t reach worked its way out.”

Also me: ‘…or it could be that pre-menstrual naproxen you started on last night.’

Me: “…or that.”

Tags:

#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #menstruation #injury cw #medical cw

May 27, 2020June 9, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

@rustingbridges

replied to your post

I think this makes perfect! I’m curious in what way this is surprising to you

Well, first of all the entire idea of balanced meals weirds me out. I eat in small-but-frequent quantities (you can see what a normal day looks like for me here), so to me the natural time unit across which one should balance one’s nutrient intake is the *day*. (Maybe even 2 – 3 days, since on any given day I often run out of appetite before covering all the categories I’d intended to.) I actually feel thrown off planning-wise when I *do* eat a balanced meal, because what am I supposed to eat to counterbalance it later? It counts towards a little bit of everything, which means it doesn’t *really* count towards *anything*.

(In fact, the entire idea of *meals* kind of weirds me out. My foods are generally much more atomised, and it never ceases to amaze me that there are so many people who go through meal levels of complicatedness and preparation almost *every time they eat*. I do that kind of shit once a day at *most*, and left to my own devices I make relatively simple meals at that.)

While my diet is quite rigid and has had some thought put into it, it’s not exactly *planned* in the same sense that yours seems to be. I don’t track precise nutrient intakes: I just try to cover a bunch of different kinds of food over the course of a time unit. The only thing I specifically seek out is fibre, as my body has repeatedly complained that [a version of my diet in which I do not actively seek out fibre] is not fibrous enough. I’ve also been eating fewer and less frequent high-fat foods, again because of negative physical responses rather than an abstract intellectual belief that they were bad for me.

Tags:

#rustingbridges #replies #food #disordered eating? #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

May 18, 2020June 9, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

being adjacent to cancel-heavy (or at least, cancel-anxious) groups for a few years has unfortunately infected me with an ability to write shitty thinkpiece theses, the two today so far have been “male/female designations of cables are transphobic” and “my sharona is pedophilic”

rendakuenthusiast:

I had the same thought re: cables some years ago but without the assumption that transphobia is bad or that people shouldn’t resist trans activists who try to make them stop referring to cables that way.

alexanderrm:

In the same vein of thought where wanting to know a stranger’s assigned gender at birth as soon as you meet them is equivalent to wanting to know what’s in their underwear or their private medical history, maybe there’s a hot take to be had that we should call them “penis” and “vagina” cables, which takes no longer to say, and is what we actually mean when we say “male/female” cables.

That would work, except no way in hell am I going to ask “Hey, anyone got any usb-vagina-wall-outlet-penis or micro-usb-penis-wall-outlet-penis cords?” in the office slack

I wouldn’t say that in the office, but on the other hand my girlfriend will absolutely live to regret your post

brin-bellway:

Huh. @tototavros, you *would* be willing to call them “male” and “female” in the office slack? I wouldn’t be comfortable with that myself: to me “male” and “female” feels like the barest fig leaf over the obvious genitalia references, still very crude overall.

(And indeed, “WTF, why are you referring to them so crudely” was my very first thought the first time I heard someone refer to them that way in my mid to late teens. I was boggled that she was not calling them “prongs” and “outlets” (sometimes “plugs” and “sockets”, though “plug” can be ambiguous as it is also an umbrella term) as I considered to be the norm, and even more boggled when I worked out that *most* subcultures in my meta-cultural neighbourhood consider comparing plugs to genitals to be the *standard* way of referring to them.)

I mean I call them male / female in the professional context, because those are the typical terms and I’m absolutely not tromping all the back to whatever closet the bits came out of because somebody failed to understand my nonstandard terminology.

and for all its crudeness, I’ve never dealt with anyone who misunderstood the analogy!

(see also)

Tags:

#conversational aglets #language #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #gender #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #discourse cw? #nsfw text

May 12, 2020June 9, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

being adjacent to cancel-heavy (or at least, cancel-anxious) groups for a few years has unfortunately infected me with an ability to write shitty thinkpiece theses, the two today so far have been “male/female designations of cables are transphobic” and “my sharona is pedophilic”

rendakuenthusiast:

I had the same thought re: cables some years ago but without the assumption that transphobia is bad or that people shouldn’t resist trans activists who try to make them stop referring to cables that way.

alexanderrm:

In the same vein of thought where wanting to know a stranger’s assigned gender at birth as soon as you meet them is equivalent to wanting to know what’s in their underwear or their private medical history, maybe there’s a hot take to be had that we should call them “penis” and “vagina” cables, which takes no longer to say, and is what we actually mean when we say “male/female” cables.

That would work, except no way in hell am I going to ask “Hey, anyone got any usb-vagina-wall-outlet-penis or micro-usb-penis-wall-outlet-penis cords?” in the office slack

I wouldn’t say that in the office, but on the other hand my girlfriend will absolutely live to regret your post

brin-bellway:

Huh. @tototavros, you *would* be willing to call them “male” and “female” in the office slack? I wouldn’t be comfortable with that myself: to me “male” and “female” feels like the barest fig leaf over the obvious genitalia references, still very crude overall.

(And indeed, “WTF, why are you referring to them so crudely” was my very first thought the first time I heard someone refer to them that way in my mid to late teens. I was boggled that she was not calling them “prongs” and “outlets” (sometimes “plugs” and “sockets”, though “plug” can be ambiguous as it is also an umbrella term) as I considered to be the norm, and even more boggled when I worked out that *most* subcultures in my meta-cultural neighbourhood consider comparing plugs to genitals to be the *standard* way of referring to them.)

shieldfoss:

According to google, the correct terminology ( in Danish ) translates into “male connector” in English (and I’ve been using male/female connector when writing in English since forever)

So

I mean

Yeah I’d absolutely use the correct technical terminology in places where I wouldn’t use “penis” and “vagina” terminology, even though it’s clearly just a figleaf for the exact same meaning.

(see also)

—

…you seem upset that my dialect has different terminology for this, and that it is non-obvious to an outsider that male/female dialects (or languages) allow their terms in *every* context including contexts famously scrupulous about not discussing sexuality?

(From my perspective, it would not have surprised me in the least if male/female dialects had some painfully circumlocutious politically-correct euphemism *specifically* for use in offices: indeed, it seemed the most likely outcome. Since my native dialect is already so politically correct, I’d figured I could afford to wait until I actually *got* an office job to confirm this: I could just ask somebody for a double-outletted adapter and they’d teach me the local euphemisms then.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #language #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #gender #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #discourse cw #scrupulosity cw? #nsfw text

May 11, 2020June 9, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

being adjacent to cancel-heavy (or at least, cancel-anxious) groups for a few years has unfortunately infected me with an ability to write shitty thinkpiece theses, the two today so far have been “male/female designations of cables are transphobic” and “my sharona is pedophilic”

rendakuenthusiast:

I had the same thought re: cables some years ago but without the assumption that transphobia is bad or that people shouldn’t resist trans activists who try to make them stop referring to cables that way.

alexanderrm:

In the same vein of thought where wanting to know a stranger’s assigned gender at birth as soon as you meet them is equivalent to wanting to know what’s in their underwear or their private medical history, maybe there’s a hot take to be had that we should call them “penis” and “vagina” cables, which takes no longer to say, and is what we actually mean when we say “male/female” cables.

That would work, except no way in hell am I going to ask “Hey, anyone got any usb-vagina-wall-outlet-penis or micro-usb-penis-wall-outlet-penis cords?” in the office slack

I wouldn’t say that in the office, but on the other hand my girlfriend will absolutely live to regret your post

brin-bellway:

Huh. @tototavros, you *would* be willing to call them “male” and “female” in the office slack? I wouldn’t be comfortable with that myself: to me “male” and “female” feels like the barest fig leaf over the obvious genitalia references, still very crude overall.

(And indeed, “WTF, why are you referring to them so crudely” was my very first thought the first time I heard someone refer to them that way in my mid to late teens. I was boggled that she was not calling them “prongs” and “outlets” (sometimes “plugs” and “sockets”, though “plug” can be ambiguous as it is also an umbrella term) as I considered to be the norm, and even more boggled when I worked out that *most* subcultures in my meta-cultural neighbourhood consider comparing plugs to genitals to be the *standard* way of referring to them.)