New Years

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

togglesbloggle:

I think we need some new traditions for New Years’, now that we’re all online and watching midnight slowly roll across our friends from one side of the world to the other in a big wave. The countdown is all well and good, of course. I’ll never turn down an excuse for a kiss! But something new and supplemental, to help bind together far-flung families and friends.

Daylight savings gives us that saturnalia-type party where you can do whatever you want in the hour that’s about to be overwritten. Is there something useful we could borrow from that? Some ritual that only makes sense while the world is mid-stride between one year and the next, some kind of magic that can leak in through the gap between them.

Tags:

#interesting ideas #(I can’t say I’ve ever heard the saturnalia thing myself) #(not even back when I was routinely awake at that time of day) #New Years #signal boosts #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

songofsaraneth:

songofsaraneth:

every time i ask people if they do any new years resolutions its all ooooo i dont like making them bc i fail or ohhhhh no i couldnt keep up wiht that and then when they ask me and i tell them about Pasta Quest (i am eating as many different pasta shapes as possible in the space of a year) or when i did Fruit Adventures (every time i saw a fruit i had never eaten before id get one and eat it and read the wikipedia article about it) theyre like hang on i forgot you can make Fun Ones i want a fun one

while i actually made this post back in May, since New Year’s is approaching here’s some of my fave suggestions from the tags if you’re looking for inspiration!

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931ea9f288ea7b31e878f4cbafdff423c0813462
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2418a686a7b9356dae6377f4ba8360c466876a51
2dda17e27978c0b66047a3028798b7fe1d0b65d8

other favorites from the notes I didn’t get screenshots of at the time:

  • learn the names/species of local plants, bugs, and birds where you live (iNaturalist or Merlin the bird app help with this)
  • learn the rules to 10 new card games
  • steal the colored paint cards from hardware store paint aisles and use them to make art
  • try out every different apple variety you can find and rank them
  • similarly LOTS of people in the notes doing soup quests, and a few cheese quests also
  • similarly lots of people reading/watching certain amounts of media over the year, and tracking/rating it
  • track the number of cats/dogs/etc you see over the year

there’s plenty more in there too :)

Tags:

#New Years #that one post with the thing #interesting ideas #food #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

comparativelysuperlative:

is2020over.com is the most important website of the year.

(Answer: no. Just today left. Could be more disasters to track, who knows.)

So anyway, the guy it’s “reluctantly made & maintained by” is speaking on the Jan. 5 about how 2020 is, finally, over. 

You can register here, assuming we make it another week.

I get why people are saying this, but I disagree. Much like how “the ‘60′s” ended in 1974, “2020″ will not end until the vaccine rollout.

For the purposes of mass coordination “the end of 2020″ is probably when the pandemic is declared officially over, but I personally will be making a Happy New Year post one week after my second dose of Pfizer-BioNTech, or on the equivalent day-of-full-effect if I end up with a different manufacturer’s vaccine.

(Tonight I’m still gonna eat traditional New Year foods and play “Auld Lang Syne” and maybe watch the Times Square ball drop if the stream doesn’t crash again, but I’m thinking I might also do it (sans ball drop) then.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #New Years #illness tw #covid19 #apocalypse cw?

~ 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

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!

Tags:

#look the ball drop is nice but it’s not worth $1200/year #(the cost of TV service) #(though we could probably have managed to get it down to ~$900) #((and maybe if you specifically wanted it *just* for the New Years coverage)) #((and you went through a lot of buying-and-cancelling hassle)) #((you might be able to get it for $25)) #((but it would be a *lot* of hassle)) #New Years #oh look an original post #adventures in human capitalism #I should probably go to bed now #(I normally go to bed sometime between 12 and 12:30)

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new years resolution: 1080p

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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{{OP by buckykingofmemes}}

Tags:

#New Years #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #this is actually true though #today I ordered that new smartphone I was talking about getting #it takes 1080p video #my current one takes 720p #(in theory anyway) #(while I’ve taken some stills I don’t think I’ve ever actually recorded video with it) #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #(there will be a short period during the changeover in which I own three) #(but once I’ve finished setting the new one up I’ll give the old one to Mom) #(and in any case it’s a category tag)

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

Happy New Year, everyone!

As is our tradition, my family gathered in the living room to eat hors d’oeuvres and chocolates while we watched the Times Square feed on TV. A couple minutes after midnight, we had the annual realisation that none of us know the words to “Auld Lang Syne” past the first verse and so can’t sing very much of it ourselves, the annual hasty scramble to find a recorded version to play instead, and the annual reminder that we don’t speak Scottish and the reason we can never remember the other lyrics is because we can’t understand them.

Ah, tradition.

(On the other hand, “getting out a smartphone and bringing up an ‘Auld Lang Syne’ video on the Youtube app” is absolutely the right way to ring in a mid-2010′s year. It felt very Correct.)

Tags:

#oh look an original post #New Years #proud citizen of The Future #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

zephindles:

And New York is into the New Year! Now that my spirits are lifted, I’m feeling a little better. :)

Happy 2015, my dears!

Happy 2015!

#also some guy just took his shirt off on abc

Looks like we were watching the same program. Apparently he promised David Letterman he would? Or something? It was weird. Like, I appreciate being a man of your word (though not that way, I’m ace), but it’s too damn cold to be taking your shirt off.

I was glad to see he’d put a coat on by the time we turned the TV off a couple minutes later.

Relatedly, my first Googling of the year was “Tony Bennett”, to check how old the old guy doing the concert with Lady Gaga was. He’s 88, which is almost a decade older than Mom had guessed. I’d never heard of him before–he’s before my time, I suppose–but my parents were impressed by how well he’s holding up.

(Yes, we get the Times Square feed in Canada, at least in the Eastern time zone. It’s just that there’s also another low-number channel showing the Niagara Falls feed. Some years the Niagara Falls feed even has a split-screen so you can see both ball drops at once.)

Tags:

#New Years #reply via reblog