is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

quiet-doll:

recently saw ppl discuss whether they put their medicines in a kitchen cabinet or a bathroom cabinet and i was shocked by the fact that many ppl said kitchen cabinet. so now i need you to reblog this and say where you keep yours

Tags:

#stuff I take routinely is on the lower shelf of my coffee table for easy access from my laptop area #stuff I take occasionally-as-needed is in the cupboard in the hallway outside of the bathroom #the cabinet above the bathroom sink is for grooming supplies‚ not medicine #surveys #domesticity #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #medical cw?

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

brin-bellway:

paradigm-adrift:

In the last 3 years I got tinnitus, feeling like I’m suffocating, and joint pain added to my moment-to-moment suffering. That’s 1 constant burden added per year. Let alone the several other minor things breaking during that time that I notice daily but not constantly.

At this rate I’ll have about 50 problems as bad as tinnitus weighing on me at any given moment by the end of my expected life span. Actually, rumor has it that new problems accelerate as you get older rather than showing up at a constant rate, so if the last 3 years aren’t a fluke, 50 could be too optimistic.

But that can’t possibly be true, right? Yeah, aging is bad, but if it were that bad people would get almost-universally institutionalized indefinitely in their 40s as the constant torture accumulates, probably, and that clearly isn’t the case. It’s gotta be better than what my gut instinct suggests the future will be like, right?

Right?

I used to wonder about this myself (right down to the annual frequency), and from my experience thus far it seems like at least part of the answer is: not all long-lasting problems are permanent. They sometimes mysteriously *disappear* just as they mysteriously appeared.

I’m not prone to earwax clogs anymore (as I was for roughly a decade). I don’t get waves of stomach pain every night around 12:50 AM anymore (several years). I usually don’t have an itching response to my own sweat anymore (~two years). I tried stopping my use of dandruff shampoo recently to see if the dandruff would come back, and so far it *hasn’t*.

(This isn’t even counting the late-onset dysmenorrhea, the chronic constipation, or the once-frequent rashes on the backs of my hands, for all of which the underlying tendency is still there but very well-controlled.)

I’m not *planning around* the possibility that, say, my ability to breathe unfiltered outdoor non-winter air will someday return, but I acknowledge that it might and I’ll gladly accept the bonus to my expected quality-of-life if it does.

#A good answer! #Thank you. (paradigm-adrift)

Tags:

#conversational aglets #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #aging cw #medical cw #illness tw? #injury cw? #venting cw?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

headspace-hotel:

impishtubist:

kispesan:

Genuinely can’t stand the new favouritism towards video format. You want me to spend a whole two minutes listening to someone say out loud a paragraph I could read in 20 seconds?

(This is about tiktok. I hate tiktok.)

It’s not just tiktok, it’s everything. I’m tired of clicking on news articles and instead finding it’s a video I have to watch. I’m tired of being sent to a video when I want to learn about a new thing instead of an article I can skim in less than a minute. You mean you want me to sit through an entire video, listening for the one kernel of information that’s buried in there that I’m interested in? Nah, man, life is too short to waste it like that. I don’t know why any of you like videos lmao.

Thank god someone said it holy fuck!!! I hate video formats!! Hate hate hate!

And it is legitimately impossible to find information on certain subjects in non-video format. “Internet lore” subjects are almost exclusively the domain of videos. Minecraft redstone tutorials? Fuck you, here’s a video.

Watching things is for some reason something I cannot get my brain to do. I don’t watch tv or movies because passively looking at a screen is not engaging enough and I get distracted, and I can’t just glance backward like you can with a book.

This is an accessibility issue. I’ve been required to watch films for classes before and had to break them up over multiple days, listen to their audio while playing minecraft or some other activity to occupy my hands, or just straight up bullshit using wikipedia summaries and stuff.

You know how when little kids try to explain something to you, they stop and start their sentences over and take forever to finish the explanation? That’s what video format is like for me. It’s just SO SLOW and takes FOREVER to get to the point compared to reading, and if I miss something or get distracted, I have to rewind the video and try to go back and catch it again.

And I can’t quickly, visually skim a video to see if it will have the information I need. If I hit skip, I might miss something important. I can’t go through the subheadings like I can in a written piece of text. There might BE an outline with subheadings for the video, but skipping forward might make me miss the handful of frames they’re displayed in. I can’t screenshot a sentence in a video so I can look at it later when I need it.

I also just process less when i’m watching a video. If I’m not doing something else while listening to the audio, I’ll miss a LOT. Information in video format just feels more ephemeral in my brain.

Someone sent me a video essay about the history of 2b2t (the minecraft server) but I haven’t watched it yet even though i’m really interested in it.

My heart breaks at the thought of all the information out there that I can’t crack my way into because the only way it’s preserved anywhere is in video format

Tags:

#yes this #that excuse for communication called speech #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #disappointed permanent resident of The Future

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

paradigm-adrift:

In the last 3 years I got tinnitus, feeling like I’m suffocating, and joint pain added to my moment-to-moment suffering. That’s 1 constant burden added per year. Let alone the several other minor things breaking during that time that I notice daily but not constantly.

At this rate I’ll have about 50 problems as bad as tinnitus weighing on me at any given moment by the end of my expected life span. Actually, rumor has it that new problems accelerate as you get older rather than showing up at a constant rate, so if the last 3 years aren’t a fluke, 50 could be too optimistic.

But that can’t possibly be true, right? Yeah, aging is bad, but if it were that bad people would get almost-universally institutionalized indefinitely in their 40s as the constant torture accumulates, probably, and that clearly isn’t the case. It’s gotta be better than what my gut instinct suggests the future will be like, right?

Right?

I used to wonder about this myself (right down to the annual frequency), and from my experience thus far it seems like at least part of the answer is: not all long-lasting problems are permanent. They sometimes mysteriously *disappear* just as they mysteriously appeared.

I’m not prone to earwax clogs anymore (as I was for roughly a decade). I don’t get waves of stomach pain every night around 12:50 AM anymore (several years). I usually don’t have an itching response to my own sweat anymore (~two years). I tried stopping my use of dandruff shampoo recently to see if the dandruff would come back, and so far it *hasn’t*.

(This isn’t even counting the late-onset dysmenorrhea, the chronic constipation, or the once-frequent rashes on the backs of my hands, for all of which the underlying tendency is still there but very well-controlled.)

I’m not *planning around* the possibility that, say, my ability to breathe unfiltered outdoor non-winter air will someday return, but I acknowledge that it might and I’ll gladly accept the bonus to my expected quality-of-life if it does.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #aging cw #medical cw #illness tw? #injury cw? #venting cw?

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

perdecum:

Do I suffer from alexithymia? I’m not sure. I definitely feel something about my experiences with it, but I can’t quite put my finger on what exactly

Tags:

#I did not *quite* literally unironically say this recently but it was close #like the thing is I generally *feel* like I have a pretty good grasp on my emotions #and then I read somebody else talking about *their* emotions and I feel like a stick figure looking at photorealism #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

the-dao-of-the-zerg:

garmbreak1:

look man, life is hard and the rules of society are complex

but let people off the fuckin train before you try to get on

and don’t play your goddamn music on your phone speakers in public

Genuinely curious: Why is music treated so much worse than conversation? If the norm was to actually be quiet on the bus, that would be one thing, but I see people primarily single out “music” without even mentioning loud conversations and such.

(I’m guilty of this too – I would never dream of playing music out loud, but get me excited and I will lose all awareness of how loud I’m talking)

Because music *is* worse than conversation. More distracting (consumes more mental processing power), and with potentially much deeper valleys of unpleasantness.

I can only assume that mileage must vary on this, though, given that store background radios are not just legal but *encouraged*.

(Even my *dentist* has a background radio. I was afraid to point out the risk of [them getting distracted by the music at a crucial moment and fucking up a procedure] for fear of self-fulfilling-prophecies/centipede’s-dilemmas. Possibly I should have at least pointed out that playing lowest-common-denominator pop music while performing potentially invasive medical procedures on people risks giving them PTSD *with extremely common triggers*: that issue seems incredibly obvious to *me*, but then I have relevant experience and perhaps it’s not obvious otherwise.)

Tags:

#we should fine the shit out of stores with background radios #you can be allowed to turn a profit once you’ve proven you can be trusted with public soundscapes #reply via reblog #music #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #medical cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #infohazards?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

moonlit-tulip:

worldoptimization:

I feel like you hear a lot from people who are like “I have this natural tendency to be very scrupulous and hard on myself and self-sacrificing, and EA ideas exacerbate that, so I have to really set boundaries and practice self-care” and so on

and I feel like that experience probably gets overrepresented due to selection bias, so to do my part in correcting that I just want to say that my natural tendencies are to be kinda lazy and self-interested, and I’m really glad the EA memeplex pushes against those tendencies, even though I’m still more lazy and self-interested than I’d like to be

My natural tendency is to be lazy and self-interested, and I’m glad the EA memeplex includes components compatible with those tendencies. Donating 10% of my income to effective charities as assessed by GiveWell or similar organizations is very low-effort, not a big enough hit to my quality-of-life to be incompatible with my self-interest, and nonetheless does a whole bunch of good in the world; the EA memeplex did a very good job of raising that opportunity to my attention, thus enabling me to fulfill my values altruism-wise far better than I otherwise could have done without abandoning my laziness and self-interest in the process. (Which I’m unlikely to do, since it would go against my self-interest.)

It is in my self-interest to live in a thriving world, and I’m glad the EA memeplex gives me more ways to help make that happen.

Tags:

#donating 10% of my income *would* be a big hit to my quality-of-life #(because every dollar counts when you’re only making like ten grand a year in the first place) #my charity budget is‚ like‚ less than one percent #maybe someday I’ll have reached a point where my house isn’t falling apart and I can reassess that #effective altruism #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

Anonymous asked: Pro-urbanism is a communo-indio-pakio-francio-anglo-zioinist plot to get as many Americans as possible into compact, easily-nuked areas, increasing the counter-value strength of small nuclear arsenals. If instead we distributed Americans and industry evenly across all American territory (including Alaska), nuclear weapons would be much less effective.

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

mitigatedchaos:

nuclearspaceheater:

afloweroutofstone:

Big if true

Definitely true.

See, this is the actual reason for rail. We can split to population into 16,000 walkable towns of 20,000 residents at a density of roughly 4,000/km2. Each will be situated on about 612 km2, and separated by about 13km in distance (the radius of the town itself will be around 1.25km).

Each town will have a single rail depot in the center with N/S and E/W lines. Buses will connect to this depot, with the short distance allowing for a trip duration of 5-10 minutes.

Trains will move at an average of around 60-70km/h, including 5 minute stop times, for about a 15 minute hop per town. This provides the population of a sizable city within a 30m-1h commute range – for every town.

A high speed express service traveling at 150 km/h might increase the reachable population to closer to 2 million. (Somewhat less due to headways and transfers.) In two hours, maybe 7 to 9 million.

Every town in America could have the network power of New York City.

There is of course the small matter of the cost of the trains, the town construction, issues with not all sites being ideal for all industry, limiting the town populations, etc, but those are just details to be sorted out later.

Tags:

#that one post with the thing #war cw? #discourse cw? #story ideas I…honestly I might actually write this #maybe…*pokes search engines trying to get a better sense of what 4k people/km^2 looks like* maybe sprawl it out a bit more #a big part of the point‚ in terms of the world I’m building here‚ is that #it lets people do the carlessness thing and the network-power thing *without the sensory overload of dense cities* #the towns I’ve been in with populations of 10k – 20k seemed to be pretty much the perfect size #the 1k – 5k towns I’ve been in were a little too small but they were close #the 100k – 200k cities were somewhat too big #Toronto was *way* too big #I’ve never been to NYC even though I used to live less than 100 miles from it and that’s probably for the best #(*looks at NYC on Street View* wait WTF this basically looks like downtown Kitchener) #(did I pick the wrong part of NYC?) #(is the idea just that it’s downtown Kitchener but it keeps up that pace over a larger area?) #((okay I guess to be fair the NYC buildings do look somewhat taller)) #((but the amount of overwhelmingness at ground level looks like it would be about the same)) #((so‚ like‚ not great‚ but not *quite* to the point of curling up in a little ball)) #((I’d still pick‚ say‚ Wellesley-but-with-a-train-station over Kitchener any day)) #tag rambles #geography #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

bending-sickle:

unpretty:

i am in my thirties and have somehow spent my entire life under the impression that the only difference between hard and soft water was that they taste and feel different. and which one you preferred was based entirely on what you were used to. now i find out that hard water is why my clothes get so fucked up so fast. people without hard water don’t agonize over how many times they can wash a soft blanket before it stops being soft. all those years of reading online discussions about how showering should only take five minutes and every other day you should just rinse your hair out with water. my intense confusion because if i try to take a five minute shower i come out looking and feeling dirtier than when i went in. if my hair gets wet in the shower and i don’t shampoo it i come out looking like i fell in the creek. if i gave myself a quick soapy rinse before work and then ran out the door without extensively moisturizing i would be the itchiest bitch alive in five minutes. i just assumed it was a body chemistry thing. now you’re telling me that other people don’t have that. that i am in Special Circumstances because every time i step in the tub i am effectively taking a mineral bath.

don’t get me fucking started on hard water and yes i am writing this right in the post i am so sorry op but where i live we have hard water (there’s a higher Very Hard level) so i would like to rant with you about how showering makes your skin so itchy and how you live and breath dandruff because your scalp is crying and how soap won’t rub off your hands no matter how hard you scrub and how drying yourself with a towel just leaves you clammy and how you have to wipe every surface down to combat the accumulation of limescale even though it doesn’t help so everything is spotted white and how your plants can just start dying because of the shitty shitty water and how you can technically drink tap water but it tastes terrible so you have to go on pilgrimages to mountain towns to get water from their fountains and how, since we’re ranting about shampoo, you think your hair is Irrevocably and Horribly damaged until you go to a city with soft water and wash it there one (1) time and your hair comes out silky and shiny and like a goddamned commercial yes i am still pissed knowing what my hair could be like if only i weren’t washing it with liquidized minerals

I hope I’m not barging in too hard, but I saw this in the notes and I thought I should tell y’all in case nobody has yet:

It’s possible to plumb a water-softening device into your home pipes. I have one, as do most homes in my area.

I’m *guessing* that for y’all there aren’t big displays of softener salt readily available in every grocery store and most convenience stores, otherwise you’d have found out sooner (although it’s also possible you *do* have displays and didn’t notice because you didn’t realise they were relevant to your interests, I could definitely see myself doing that), but some models run off of resin beads instead and only need the resin replaced every few years (possibly at the cost of worse taste than salt-based systems, but I’m not sure about that part).

I was doing some googling on prices recently because mine is getting old and decrepit, and it looks like it’s on the order of a few thousand if you don’t already have your pipes set up for it, or a few hundred to slot in a unit on piping already designed around it. I’m aware that a few grand is a lot of money and that many people don’t have the authority to make those kinds of changes to their homes, but it’s still good to know that it’s *possible* to have soft water without having to move to a naturally-soft area.

Tags:

#we have one (1) hard-water tap for my mom and brother to drink out of #(because for some reason they actually *like* the taste) #everything else is softened #(except for when the softener unit fails to realise that it needs to cycle on because‚ again‚ decrepit) #(in which case I press the on button manually and 15 minutes later it’s fine) #the more you know #our home and cherished land #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #PSA #domesticity #reply via reblog

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

etirabys:

I started reading Carolyn Elliott’s Existential Kink because of this blog post, am 1/3 through, and cannot imagine a book that could more appeal to me while also belonging to a genre that will say, “What [this book] is presenting to you here is … a witchy, tricksy, feminine path to enlightenment that’s quite a bit different than the more publicly vaunted, masculine routes of asceticism, contemplation, and yogic saintliness.”

The ultimate operation the book is trying to perform on the reader, assuming the reader has preexisting masochistic tendencies they can amplify, is to get them to notice the pleasure they can potentially take in the most uncomfortable moments of their lives and reframe it as pleasure. 

The worldview/aesthetic the book tries to impart:

[I thought,] “God is one kinky-ass motherfucker. God—the divine—whatever He/She/IT is—creates this world, and this world is a gonzo horror show of war and rape and abuse and addiction and disaster. If God is running the show, God must like it this way!” Now, you might guess that a thought like that would lead to some kind of terrible nihilistic breakdown. But for me… actually, it didn’t. Instead, it made me smile—perversely—and gave me a feeling of lightness, play, and possibility. …
Well if God is a kinky freak and I’m a part of God like all these “spiritual” people say, maybe deep down I’m a kinky freak too. And maybe I can get more in touch with my divine nature by giving myself permission to like all the scary stuff in life, instead of just resenting it. …
I propose that all our suffering and stuckness in life comes from forgetting that we’re divine sparks playing a wild kinky game and that great miracles can come forth in our lives when we reverse the process of forgetting by deliberately reclaiming the pleasure of the game.

The title is well chosen! The book is trying to get the reader to treat life itself as one big BDSM scene that they can lean into if they want.

Which, this is a weird sell, but it happens that I’m totally into this and have been doing it on my own*, so having someone dump a whole framework of doing life that extends this is delightful and intellectually stimulating!

* I used to be normally socially anxious where I just felt awful, but these days when I’m uncomfortable because I said something stupid or cruel, or someone’s pushing my boundaries, 50% of the time I notice and go, “whoa, I’m uncomfortable, that’s interesting and nice in a way”. I do this simply because it’s better to feel nice and interested than awful. Raw misery is hard to spin this way, but anything complicated where there’s some human nuance in it provides a launchpad for this transition.

The author describes “orgasmic meditation” where she lies down for a time-limited period, focuses on the sensation as someone rubs her clit, and does not attempt to change the kind of stimuli she is receiving. There are obviously strokes she likes and strokes she is less into, and part of the point is to expand the range of things she can enjoy – going from “oh, not this one” to “yes, even this one”. And you can apply this same process to, well, life:

This practice of “getting off on every stroke” can, by analogy, be extended beyond the context of Orgasmic Meditation (or sex) and be applied to life, wherein one considers everything that happens as a “stroke.” As in, comments that other people make to you—those are strokes. Surprising situations that arise—those are strokes. A critical monologue from some inner voice—those are strokes.

Also very congruent with how I (would like to) think of life.

I would never recommend this book broadly. Either you’re open to being expansively masochistic like this appealing or you aren’t. But man is it good at articulating a cohesive is+ought framework that, if you could lean into it, can get you to do this top-down reinterpretation of more experiences as pleasurable.

Tags:

#(I’m going to be ragging on this‚ so I want to say upfront that if you are someone who gets something valuable out of this then that’s great #and you should live your joy) #(I reserve my emotions here for the pattern‚ not the readers) #…okay maybe this is overly meta but I *am* kind of fascinated by my visceral revulsion at this? #it’s kind of trainwrecky‚ I think #somebody actually managed to combine #”zealousness-of-converts!Buddhists waxing lyrical about how being a p-zombie is the highest form of existence” #and ”those assholes in kink spaces who think that because *they’re* into BDSM that everyone with non-normative sexual interests is too” #(with a touch of salvia memory-game shit for flavour!) #I did not expect to see *those* synthesised #(and yet it makes so much sense in hindsight) #and I have to take my hat off to it even as I hate every fibre of its being #tag rambles #sexuality and lack thereof #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #nsfw text #amnesia cw #death tw? #I don’t know‚ what’s the content warning for enlightenment