oh look an original post

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

Background radio at work: *opening notes of “Call Me Maybe”*

My brain: “♪ My name is Nietzsche, hello/A sort of nihilist bro/Hey, God is dead, did you know?/What is morality? ♫”

Tags:

#this actually happened *last* week #but I was thinking about it again because last night they played ”Counting Stars” #and I ended up with the Awakening of the Birds soundtrack stuck in my head #my brain has some firm opinions on what the primary versions of songs are and they are not always the same as the mainstream view #Amenta #philosophy #music #oh look an original post #in which Brin has a job #♪ I gazed into the abyss ♫ #♪ off of that dark precipice ♫ #♪ in existentialist bliss ♫ #♪ it gazed back into me ♫

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I’m not sure what’s funnier: the fact that the French translation of this blurb doesn’t include the bit about “legume” being “a funny sounding French word”, or the hypothetical version where they *did* include it.

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(Note also the translation of the “Yes, peas!” pun as “Oui, s’il vous pois!”, which–I don’t speak French anywhere near well enough to know how well that really works, but from what I can tell they may have actually pulled that one off.)

Tags:

#I was expecting dried pea pods #but it turns out these are actually pea-pod-shaped rice puffs but with the rice flour mixed with a large proportion of pea flour #I can see why people would like them but I don’t think they’re for me #now I know #oh look an original post #our home and cherished land #language #food

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

Sort-of-tagged by @maryellencarter.

the last movie you watched: I don’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised if I haven’t watched a movie beginning-to-end since seeing Mockingjay Pt 2† in a theatre. I’m not really big on video.

(Which is also why I haven’t done the favourite-movies-as-gifs meme @agapi42 tagged me in. Sorry, Agapi: I do appreciate that you thought of me, but I don’t think I’m the right person to do that meme.)

Edit: wait, hang on, I saw The Force Awakens (I think shortly after it came out on DVD), and that would have been more recent than Mockingjay. So that puts a new cap on how long ago the most recent movie could have been.

the last tv series you watched: There is…a distinct possibility that I have not sought out any TV since Daily Planet ended. Again, not big on video. Mom has been watching The Worst Witch and Merlin, usually while I am in the room.

the last webseries you watched: I know I watched Red vs Blue a few years back (think I got partway through S12). Neither my sense of the boundaries of “webseries” nor my sense of what time things happened is good enough to say if there were any more recent than that.

the last comedy special you watched: I agree with maryellencarter, re: what does this even mean.

Hmm…*googles “comedy special”*

This appears to mean a recorded stand-up act, especially but not necessarily on Netflix. It has been so long since I watched stand-up that I really couldn’t say who it was, let alone which specific act.

the last podcast you listened to: Talk the Talk, as is traditional on the ride over to an exam. (I had my accounting midterm today.) The episode in question was apparently locked behind a Patreon paywall some time after I downloaded it, but it’s about Chinese puns and censorship.

the last game you played:
     Video game: Flight Rising. My familiar fund is coming along nicely, though gems per se are a bit hard to come by at the moment what with the new Starmap gene.
     Board game: Wormhole, a locally-designed trivia game (mostly history and geography, with the occasional science question) my parents found at Value Village (thrift store chain, pretty much the Canadian version of Goodwill). I later saw it at a board-game store for 90% off, so I guess it wasn’t too popular. (And indeed, nothing relevant comes up when I google it.) It’s okay as trivia games go, though the difficulty level of the questions feels pretty variable (and they aren’t divided into distinct difficulty levels).
    App game: I don’t play these much at the moment. Whenever Pokemon Go sends me a “we miss you, here’s some free stuff to entice you back” code I pop in, redeem it, and then immediately leave, so technically Pokemon Go. (I figure there’s a good chance I’ll start playing again at some point, and I might as well acquire a stockpile of double-XP items and egg incubators for if/when that happens.) Actually *playing* might have also been Pokemon Go, or it might have been sudoku.

the last book you read: Hmm. My reading has mostly not been in book form lately. Probably Welcome to Floating Point. (That’s just the first one, not the whole trilogy: I haven’t finished the rest yet.) The author’s habit of using “spoke” rather than “said” as the default speech marker is a little irritating, but I liked it otherwise.

Alternately, if you want something more traditionally published and/or costing money: Pyramid of Peril. (Though, in fairness re: costing money, the audiobook is now free. But I already owned the ebook, and I prefer text to audiobooks anyway.)

the last comic book you read: I don’t read comic books myself.

the last webcomic you read: I think XKCD was more recent than Parhelion.

the last song you listened to: “Tried”, by Assemblage 23.

the last musical you listened to: I don’t really do these either. By default, then, “Once More, With Feeling”: the only musical whose soundtrack I own.

the last thing you searched online: Online, I’m not sure. I looked up kewra on Wikipedia this afternoon, but it wasn’t online because I didn’t have Wi-Fi. (Well, come to think of it I didn’t actually *check* if the Indian food store had public Wi-Fi, but I doubt they did.)

the last outfit you left the house in: A green Girl Scout camp T-shirt (Girl *Scout*, not Girl Guide: that’s how old this shirt is), brown leggings, plain white socks from the big pack I bought in Florida upon finding the socks I’d brought weren’t enough for all the walking around Disney I was doing, hiking boots, utility belt††, one-litre water bottle on shoulder strap.

(I don’t especially *like* camping, but I tend to wind up with Camper Aesthetic anyway, as a side effect of prepper tendencies. I never leave the house *intending* to spend the night in the woods, but I also never leave the house without enough gear that I *could*, if necessary, do so. Also, hiking boots are comfortable.)

(For the record, it has never yet been necessary. I have still never used my foil blanket. But if I ever need it, there it will be.)

the last completely unnecessary thing you purchased: I was going to say McDonalds food, but it was a post-exam treat, which disqualifies it by the rules maryellencarter’s answer uses.

Mind you, I normally go to Tim Hortons–which is noticeably cheaper than McDonalds–for my post-exam treat, so arguably the *additional* $5 vs getting a Timmies bagel *was* completely unnecessary. (But I had a coupon for a free medium fry and drink with purchase, and it had been a long time–actually, hang on, I can literally look that up: it’d been a little over two years–since I bought any McDonalds, so I decided to go for it this time.)

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†Fun prosopagnosia fact: Katniss Everdeen looks a lot like I would without glasses, but Jennifer Lawrence looks nothing like me.

††Maybe I should make an updated list of utility-belt contents: I keep finding myself wanting to link to it and only having the 2012 version available.

Tags:

#when Mom asks me what I want for my birthday/Hanukkah and I’ve run out of ideas #I look at the camping section of Amazon and see if I can find any Useful Thing inspiration there #pretty sure that’s how I found the solar-powered phone charger #(which I don’t own yet but I expect I’ll get it for my birthday) #oh look an original post #meme #adventures in University Land #food #(ever since the Pillowfort thing I’ve been noticing just how often my posts link to previous posts on my Tumblr) #(almost any post where I contribute significantly #–rather than just ”hey here’s a neat thing”– #is part of a broader context of my other writings) #(and many of said writings are comments) #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

For some reason this morning I was thinking about l’esprit d’escalier (or, no, we’ve started calquing that into “staircase wit”, haven’t we?), and this one post I read maybe a year or three ago.

I think the blogger (I don’t recall who it was) was talking about being “good, giving, and game”: that when negotiating a sexual relationship, it’s good to be open to doing things that, while you really don’t *mind* doing them†, you don’t find erotic yourself (but your partner does).

And the example they used was how they once encountered a man whose primary fetish was painting women’s fingernails while they were under sedation. And this, they said, is someone who is probably only going to be satisfied in a relationship with someone good, giving, and game: after all, women in the audience, would *you* get off on having a man paint your fingernails while you were under sedation?

And I don’t think I ever commented with “Well, actually…”, and I kind of regret that.

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(To be fair, there’s still a GGG aspect there, since I don’t care about fingernail painting. And while in *theory* being sedated is hot, in practice sedatives tend to come with side effects (unconsciousness, amnesia, non-lucidity, sometimes all of the above) severe enough that it’s not worth taking them recreationally. (though in fairness to *that*, I *am* pretty sure the question was phrased as “would you get off on it” without reference to “and would you be willing to do it IRL”, and the 5 – 10 minutes or so on dimenhydrinate where you’re high but haven’t lost consciousness yet *are* definitely erotic) And it would make a good segue into a related negotiation point of “sometimes kinks are compatible even when they’re not pointing at the same thing”. And–I think this was the thing that actually stopped me, since at the time I probably still *could* have responded–it felt like something of an asshole move to fight the hypothetical when they could just as easily have picked some other obscure fetish such that nobody in the audience *did* find it appealing.

But it was still kind of a prime comedic moment that they picked *that* example when talking to a group including *me*.)

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†Not to be confused with sexual acts you’re *grudgingly* willing to do, which are generally a bad idea.

Tags:

#oh look an original post #people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me #sexuality and lack thereof #drugs cw #nsfw text #(and I think it’s close enough to put it in here too:) #high context jokes

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

@acemindbreaker​, I didn’t want to directly reblog this thread (there were some pretty pressuring bits in previous parts of the reblog chain, and I follow a no-guilt-trips policy), but I did want to try and answer your question.

You live in Saskatchewan, right? It looks like this is Saskatchewan’s version of the medication assistance program my family’s on.

IIRC, the Ontarian program specifies that to qualify for it your household must spend more than 4% of its collective income on prescription meds†, and the program acts to cap your spending at 4% of income (each quarter you only pay up to that figure, and then the program kicks in and pays for the rest of your meds that quarter). The Saskatchewan page seems rather more vague about what its qualifiers and effects are, but the information might be buried in there somewhere, and presumably it has *some* effect for *some* people.

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I was not involved in the decision to make No Frills our primary pharmacy (it was a while ago), but I assume my parents had their reasons to switch over from Pharmasave, and they were probably financial reasons. The No Frills website says there are only three of them in all of SK, so you might very well not live near one, but the general idea might hold. I don’t know what websites might help you in determining which pharmacies are cheaper than others, though: search listings seem to be clogged with places trying to smuggle(?) Canadian meds into the United States.

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(And the smuggling brings up something that may be worth noting, that in some cases the efforts of Americans to get cheaper meds are just trying to bring prices down to a level Canadians would consider full price, and to some extent the reason there is less Canadians can do is because there is less to be done. I still remember, shortly after we moved, how horrified our new friends were when they heard what my parents had been paying for their medications. But I don’t want to put too much emphasis on that: even when things are better than they *could* be, it’s often important to try to make them better still.)

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†so I suspect we’re going to get kicked out at the next assessment now that we’re making more, but anyway

Tags:

#this post technically qualifies as: #oh look an original post #but is closer to the spirit of: #reply via reblog #our home and cherished land #adventures in human capitalism

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

Home!

*flop*

hooooome

The post here about unsecured borders of the world (which is to say, unsecured borders of the European Union) is going around again.

The last time I saw this post going around, there were a whole bunch of comments expressing shock that not all borders are heavily restricted. And while it did sadden me to see so many people unaware that not all borders are like…whichever borders it was they were thinking of†, it also saddened me to see them walking away with the idea that the intra-EU method is necessarily what it means to have a non-heavily-restricted border.

So, I’m repurposing this post I made in 2015.

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Shown above is the border between Port Huron, Michigan and Sarnia, Ontario. (Note that my description of what border crossings are *typically* like will be describing Niagara Falls, but Sarnia is the picture I had lying around, and the one time I went through Sarnia the experience was about the same.)

The border crossing itself took maybe two minutes, and mostly because the border guard chatted about the good things he’s heard about our town. One minute for the crossing itself is more typical, plus another minute for each car ahead of you in line (but we usually cross on weekday afternoons, when the lines tend to be short).

Usually they’ll ask you where you’re going (or where you went), why, and for how long. (*Occasionally* they won’t even do that, if you show the passport of the country you’re entering, but for the most part they still do it if you’re a citizen.) Most answers I have had cause to give (“shopping for a few hours”, “visiting relatives for a week”, “Disney World!”), they just nod and wave you through, and possibly make a note so they can check if you tell the same story on your way back. If you show a U.S. passport and tell them you’re going to Canada because you live there, they will sometimes ask why you moved, but they don’t press further if you just say you like it there.

While they reserve the right to search your stuff if you give inconsistent answers to their questions or have clearly-visible contraband or maybe show a passport from a country they’re on shaky terms with or something, they do not search you by default. If you went shopping, they ask you how much you bought (and sometimes to see your receipts as well), and if your answers indicate that you’re over the duty-free limit on anything they send you over to a nearby building to pay your import taxes, which takes a few extra minutes.

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I just wanted people to know that border security isn’t binary, that there exist places where there *are* guards and you *do* have to show a passport but it’s *not* a big ordeal.

I don’t have any strong opinions about what borders should be like in general: I don’t feel that I’m well enough informed on that, and TBH I’m mostly just trying to survive right now and don’t really have the energy to get well informed. (though I’d certainly be annoyed if they started making it an ordeal to go grocery shopping in New York)

But if you’re looking to develop an opinion on border security, please remember that “more borders should be like US/Canada” is a possible stance. There’s more than one way to guard a border, and you can think some ways are going too far without wanting to go full EU (and conversely, you can want to not go full EU but still think some ways are going too far).

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†If you’re someone who was shocked, let me know which borders you think of when thinking of country borders. I’m curious to see where exactly our experiences differ.

Tags:

#oh look an original post #(close enough) #our home and cherished land #home of the brave #the more you know

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Quarterly report’s done!

(sorry about the tininess of the picture: Tumblr is not very good at images significantly wider than they are tall. you may need to click on it to see it clearly.)

Tags:

#notice how the number on the right is bigger than the number on the left #what a lovely novelty #(fun fact: removing any one person’s effect on the income would be enough to drop it below expenses) #(this is very much a group effort) #(while Brother is by far the highest earner we are *all* of vital importance) #((ftr ”outstanding” deposits here mean paycheques sitting in people’s wallets at June 30th)) #((if we were living paycheque-to-paycheque or otherwise needed that money available ASAP we *could* easily)) #((have gotten it into the bank by the end of the quarter)) #((and I’m not going to make our income appear artificially low just because we hadn’t gotten around to visiting the bank that fortnight)) #(((don’t worry I remembered to remove the outstanding deposits from *last* quarter from the calculations so as not to double-count them))) #adventures in human capitalism #oh look an update #tag rambles #oh look an original post #\o/

~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

@sinesalvatorem, I was going to reblog your post [link], but I figure giving poverty advice in a reblog when the OP is about how one shouldn’t give poverty advice is asking for trouble (especially when OP has relatively few notes), so I’m pinging you on a fresh post instead.

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>>On that note, if anyone who reads this has any life hacks wrt saving money or earning extra income, or knows online resources that have compiled a bunch of them, please tell me! I already know of quite a few, but I’m always looking for more.<<

Hey, look, a special interest!

(or, well, part special interest, part coping mechanism)

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(Disclaimers: I acknowledge that for any or all of these things, you [may already do them]/[may not find them worthwhile]/[may not be able to do them at all]. If anything in the rest of this post sounds like I don’t, that’s just because it’s sometimes easier to get the words out that way.

A more specific version that I feel is particularly worth pointing out: while I have had plenty of financial difficulties and qualify as “poor” by many definitions, I have never (quite) been *broke*. Some of these tips will be stuff like “how to spend $800 in one day in order to avoid spending $1,400 over four months”, and if you never have $800 on hand at any given time feel free to ignore that (though maybe file them away for if/when you reach a point in your life where you can afford to tie up some money for a while in order to spend less in the long run).)

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This has been kind of a recurring theme on my blog lately, but: housemates are so important. Finances are best played as a team sport: going it alone is sadly necessary in some situations, but it’s definitely Hard Mode, and being poor is hard enough as it is without adding more difficulty modifiers on top of it.

(It *is* painful to have to watch people you share finances with spend money in ways you don’t approve of, but–I remind myself at such times–it’s still completely worth it for all the bulk discounts and such you can get. (Although I’m sure there are *some* people out there somewhere who are careless enough with money that this would not be true, and obviously you don’t want to share finances with such people.))

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People hate on Uber-type things a lot, but honestly, they really can be a lifesaver. Delivery gigs are what tipped us over into being in the black for March†. (Up ~CAD$230 over the course of that month! God, it’d been *so* long since our money had been on any kind of upward trend for any significant length of time.) Some companies in some places will also hire bicyclist or even pedestrian delivery freelancers.

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People also hate on advice to avoid bank-related fees because sometimes when you’re poor they’re unavoidable, but it’s still worth checking that each fee really *is* unavoidable before resorting to it.

(You know why I switched from annual statements to quarterly? Because I found out while preparing the 2017 statement that my parents had gone below their minimum chequing-account balance (which incurs a CAD$11 fee for each month it happens) *eleven months* out of the year, and had been quietly shouldering it *even though the household as a whole had enough money to cover everyone’s minimum balances*: it was just disproportionately in the kids’ accounts because at the time only the kids were employed. I immediately insisted on providing my parents with an informal, indefinite loan to help them cover their balance††, and started doing more frequent statements so we can catch shit like that sooner.

(Apparently Dad was embarrassed and Mom didn’t want to ~burden~ her children when she was ~supposed~ to be providing for them. And I was like “You can use the money you’re saving in bank fees towards buying me food.”))

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You make a remark about the restaurants in San Francisco being expensive, and of course in this part of Tumblr I hear plenty about how high the rents are. To what extent does the Bay have generally high prices across the board (or for groceries in particular: grocery prices are about to be important), and how far away do you have to get from the Bay for things to stop having that markup?

The New York trick (travel to an area with a lower cost of living, stock up on cheap groceries to bring back) is harder in a place with no nearby-ish country borders or similar clear markers of “you are now entering the Cheap Zone”, but it might still be doable there.

(I think the trick used by people who *live* in Cheap Zones is to use coupons *intended* for places with higher costs of living (with discounts sized accordingly), but which are technically valid there. Occasionally these can even be stacked: Mom almost always brings some coupons (from American websites) to New York.)

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Target does ad-matching: if you show them that another store’s flyer has a sale on a certain food, they will sell you that food at the other store’s sale price, letting you avoid the hassle and transportation costs of running all over town chasing deals. (note that Target does not match produce) The Flipp app [link] will give you the flyers for a (U.S. or Canada) postal code of your choice.

Walmart does not do ad-matching as such (in America; Canadian Walmarts still do it), but if you scan your Walmart receipt into their app, they will issue you an e-gift card for the amount you *would* have saved if they allowed it.

There might be other stores in your particular area that do matching, but these are the only ones I found when I was looking this up in an Arizonan context recently. It seems to be less common in America than it is in Canada.

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Running ad videos and occasionally doing other stuff through Swagbucks is a nice way to get a bit of supplemental income. I recently helped Mom write a guide to using it [link], so I will direct you there. (please use the referral links, I’d very much appreciate it)

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If you have anything that gives you a discount on Amazon purchases and/or generates income in the form of Amazon credit (like, say, Swagbucks), bear in mind that Amazon has an ever-expanding selection of other stores’ gift cards [link] (including, notably, Safeway [link]), almost all of which can be purchased using Amazon credit.

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There’s this one program of incentives to encourage lower electricity use during peak periods [link] that I keep getting ads for from advertisers who don’t realise I’m not Torontonian, which is only available in Toronto and parts of California (weird list, I know). Is that applicable to you, or likely to become so?

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I haven’t done any freelance audio transcription for Rev [link] in a while, but you might be better suited to it than I am. (Maybe your picking-out-what-people-are-saying-at-crowded-parties ability would help you here?)

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>>At one point, I even had a list of which staple items are cheaper at which stores, but homelessness means I keep moving too much for that to ever stay relevant.<<

Some grocery stores let you look up their prices online, making it easier to collect data for such lists and less painful (relatively) to keep making new ones for new places.

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I recently systematically went through the websites of every cell company available in this area and determined the single best phone plan for getting our house phone to do everything we currently need it to do while paying as little as possible, and I am very glad I did. If we hadn’t been careful, we could easily have ended up paying twice as much or more.

Unfortunately, there is essentially zero overlap between my available cell companies and yours, so I can’t just skip you to the end result of “Public Mobile is great; Freedom Mobile *might* be even better *if* you’re planning to only use your phone in cities”: you’d have to either do the comparisons yourself or find somebody more local who’s done it.

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Some restaurants and the occasional grocery store will give you free food on your birthday. The selection is heavily location-dependant; there are various websites listing the available things for a given place (example: https://www.favoritecandle.com/free-birthday-meals/San-Francisco/CA), though their information is often out of date and you’ll need to check with each restaurant’s own website. Most require newsletter signups (I have a dedicated email address specifically for newsletters from people who might give me free stuff); many require you to buy something else in order to receive the freebie with it, but there are a few that are outright free (except transportation costs, of course: plan your route carefully, and ideally have them be on the way to somewhere you were going anyway). Last year I got a muffin (Starbucks) and a large fruit slushie (Booster Juice): this year Starbucks has unfortunately stopped offering freebies unless you buy at least one thing from them per year (any time during the year, though, not specifically your birthday! still suitable for lots of people!), but I’ve found a couple more newsletters and am set up to get a bag of chocolate-covered almonds (Giant Tiger) and a hamburger (Harvey’s), plus another slushie. (And who knows, maybe I’ll end up at Starbucks at some point between now and November and regain muffin eligibility for this year.)

(maryellencarter, if you’re reading this, note that I’m planning to give you a pre-sifted list of these for your birthday: you don’t need to go figuring this out yourself. I’ll probably compile and send it in October sometime, so that there’ll be less time for circumstances to change while still leaving room for the restaurants to consider you to have been on their newsletter for a sufficient length of time beforehand.)

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My finances tag, “adventures in human capitalism”, might have some other stuff that I missed or covered in less detail here.

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†I don’t have a good picture of our finances after March yet: I’ve switched to preparing quarterly financial statements (formerly annual), but I haven’t finished collecting and processing the data from Q2, so right now it’s scattered around various bank accounts and credit-card records of four different people and I can’t see what it’s like overall.

††Honestly, I don’t really care whether they pay it back or not. Money used for things beneficial to me is mine for all practical purposes, and I’m not too concerned with whose bank account it happens to be in. (Mom expressed her gratitude at my “selflessness” recently, but I’m *really* not selfless: I’m just very aware that working together is in my own best interest. I don’t make anywhere near enough to survive alone: hell, often I can’t even contribute an equal share towards the group’s expenses, and have to find non-income ways to contribute like accounting and pest control. (I’ve gotten pretty good at killing houseflies. As long as they’re up against a window they’re easy.))

Tags:

#this post technically qualifies as: #oh look an original post #but is closer to the spirit of: #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #long post #death mention #food #home of the brave #our home and cherished land

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

This draft’s original set of tags (here left intact) refers to late January 2014 as being nearly three years ago, so that gives you an idea of when it was written.

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“Even if the risks are small, they are not justified when the evidence indicates no benefit.”

–Steven Novella, on acupuncture

–Also me, on fluid exchange

Tags:

#if I ask myself ”Is kissing this person worth the risk of oral herpes?” #and conclude ”no” #this doesn’t mean that the value I place on not having herpes is too high #it just means the value I place on kissing them is very low #such that even the slightest downside is enough to outweigh it #(I mean I *am* somewhat germophobic and *do* place significant value on not having herpes) #(but I think I would be pretty cautious about who I spit-bond with even if I weren’t germophobic) #(I would still have a mild incentive to be cautious and no incentive *not* to be cautious) #((I suppose non-germophobic!me would have to be less desperate in order to accept a shared water bottle)) #((but that’s about it)) #oh look an original post #tag rambles #illness tw? #asexuality #((yes that post I linked is nearly three years old)) #((I’ve had it sitting around in my quote file for just such an occasion))

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

While I’ve completed the move to the new laptop [link], it’s occurred to me that my on-site Tumblr drafts folder is also not included in my backups, and I should probably clear *these* drafts out too.

Tumblr doesn’t seem to provide information on when a draft was made, but this one was already pretty old when I mentioned it in June 2017 [link]. It also pre-dates my switch from italics to asterisks to denote emphasis: I have edited its word-emphasis method to help the emphasis show up more reliably.

(This post is not entirely unrelated to my previous post [link], which is what reminded me to do this now.)

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I was sick, and it was the middle of the night, and earlier I’d been having problems where my brain would skip straight to dreaming while neglecting to fall asleep first. (It is a strange and unpleasant experience to dream non-lucidly despite also being aware of one’s body lying on one’s bed. Especially if one is having a nightmare about alien invasions.)

I knew I was going to sleep terribly, one way or another, but I was determined to lie there until morning and hopefully get a bit of restorative unconsciousness here and there. (Sometimes I get to bed a bit late, but if it is Designated Sleeping Time *and* I have already gone to bed, by god I will lie there as long as it takes (or until 8 AM or so, whichever comes first). I do not give up on bedtime.)

A couple hours in, I heard a voice in my head. It wasn’t mine.

I was 14, so by this point I’d already read a bunch of neurodiversity stuff on multiplicity. I was in a lucid period and knew she was *probably* a transient hallucination, but the possibility that she might not be didn’t freak me out.

I calmly explained to her that while I was not *inherently* averse to considering her a real person, given the circumstances I was understandably reluctant to assume sapience, and she would probably do the same in my place. I told her that if she were still there when I was fully awake I would provisionally accept her personhood, and if she stuck around even after I’d recovered from my illness we’d start hashing out plans for co-existence. In the meantime, real or not I could use the company. Any ideas for a conversational topic?

She ignored me, and continued complaining about having to share the pain of my ear infection. Shortly after, she was gone.

(Okay, this next bit may require some context. My thoughts often take the form of dialogues, which seems to be fairly common. People vary in the level of independence of these “conversational partners”, but I am pretty far towards the singlet end of the spectrum, and perceive myself as consciously controlling both halves.)

So a couple hours after that, around dawn, I was thinking (like you do), in dialogue form (like you do), and…not all at once, but gradually, I realised: I didn’t know what he was going to say.

And he said “I know, it’s weird, isn’t it? Is this what it’s like, being alive? Is this how you feel all the time? So *vibrant*?”

He said he knew it probably wouldn’t last long, and that while he *liked* being this way, it wouldn’t be *so* bad to go back to being a mere part of me. It wasn’t like it was dying or anything, just…he wished we could at least merge *properly*. He was sad that I wouldn’t remember this conversation from his perspective, that this part of him, this interesting experience, would just *vanish*.

(He wondered if he would get it back if I hallucinated him again in some future illness, if other hallucinatory hims would have continuity with this one. It hasn’t happened again, so we haven’t found out.)

He was, at least, better company than the complaining woman.

Tags:

#whether he was actually sapient during that conversation I don’t know #I expect the woman wasn’t but he was more responsive and *much* more introspective #in which Brin somehow manages to be among the most singlet people she knows #oh look an original post #amnesia cw #illness tw #death tw?