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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

Part 2 of draft-clearing: another CORDYCEPS-related draft. This one is dated September 15th, 2016.

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Did you know there’s a Greek alphabet song? {{this was marked as “insert a link here”, but the Youtube URL of the particular version past!me was thinking of was not included}}

I didn’t know for *sure* there was until today, but last night it occurred to me that it was *plausible* that one might exist, and if so it would be pretty helpful in making sure I knew the names of all the Greek letters and learning what order they go in.

Why did I want to learn the Greek letters, you might ask? Well.

So, I read CORDYCEPS [link], yeah? And my brain was like “Hey look, a new skin for our recurring amnesia nightmares [link]!”

And the thing is, my subconscious has been fairly insistent† that my INO is the Greek alphabet. This is weird because I *don’t have the ordering of the Greek alphabet memorised*. I mean, I know the order of the first five letters because of Brave New World, but after that, ???

So now I’m actually learning the order of the Greek alphabet *just so that this will stop bugging me*.

(…thank you @itsbenedict? I guess? For…inspiring me to learn?)

†If by “fairly insistent” you mean “both of the two times it’s come up”.

Tags:

#I never did *completely* memorise the ordering #but I’m much further along than five now #might finish it at some point #oh look an original post #cordyceps tcftog #amnesia cw

~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

I’m cleaning out my notepad program in preparation for a move to a new† laptop††, and I found this Tumblr draft dated March 10th, 2016.

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One of the worst non-obvious things about prosopagnosia is that it *reduces the amount of serendipity in your life*.

All else equal, I have far fewer chance meetings with old friends and colleagues than a non-faceblind person would. I have witnessed my mother having chance meetings that I would not have had in her place. I abandoned Orphan Black partway through the first episode because it disturbed me too much, knowing that if they’d based the clones’ on *my* genetic structure instead of hers, the entire show would never have happened. Sarah and Beth would have walked right by each other and never known. How many plot hooks (let alone easter eggs) have I missed out on in my own personal narrative?

(I went bowling on my 22nd birthday. In the group playing on the lane next to my family, there was a girl who looked just like I would if I didn’t wear glasses. I assume it was a coincidence. I assume she was not a secret clone or long-lost twin. If I am wrong in that assumption, I will never find out. If one day I passed someone I assumed to be a stranger, and they were actually a former acquaintance who would have given me some life-changing piece of information had I struck up a conversation with them like old times, I will never find out. Almost certainly, I have at the very least passed by acquaintances who would have given me non-life-*changing* but life-*enhancing* pieces of information, had I only known it was them.)

(This post inspired by CORDYCEPS [link], another story whose plot is dependant on one person recognising another’s face. I like the mystery and I like Benedict’s writing, so I’ve been reading it anyway for now.)

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†And by “new”, I mean “seven years old, but significantly higher-spec than my current seven-year-old laptop”. Dad’s laptop broke, so we agreed that I would buy a “new” one for me and hand my old one down to him. Back in the day, *I* used to get *his* hand-me-down computers, but my computer requirements have now outpaced his (fortunately not to the point where my usual laptop budget of ~USD$300 is an insufficient amount of money), so.

††My backups are generally pretty thorough, and it wouldn’t have been a disaster data-wise if I’d woken up this morning to find my laptop permanently unable to boot (which did happen to me one morning in my mid-teens! no warning, no particular reason AFAIK why that motherboard chose that night to fail, it just did!), but I’ve found a couple overlooked spots.

Tags:

#(I did finish Cordyceps) #(it was good if a bit horror-y for my tastes) #oh look an original post #prosopagnosia #amnesia cw? #cordyceps tcftog

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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While I’m on the subject of alternate education methods having fewer obstacles than you might think, here is an example of how a homeschooler goes on field trips:

Mom: *looking at local teacher resources on the Internet*

Resources: Try taking your class for a tour at the nearby widget factory! They do tours for Grades 5 – 12, with a minimum class size of 10, and it’s only $5/student!

Mom: Hey kids, you want to tour a widget factory?

Me: Yeah!

Brother: Sure.

Mom, emailing the field-trip-coordination mailing list: Hey guys, if I can get at least 10 kids aged 10 and up together, I’ll call the widget factory and schedule a tour. Preliminary date is the second Thursday of next month. Cost is $5/kid, paid to me when you get there so I can pay for the group. I’ve already got two signed up. Who’s with me?

Parent: I’ve got three kids for the list!

Other parent: My 12-year-old’s not interested, but the 14-year-old will go.

[etc]

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[second Thursday of next month]

Tour guide: Okay kids, time to settle down and at least pretend to listen to the spiel–wait. You’re already settled down, and you appear to be *actually* listening to the spiel. Huh. It’s almost like you wanted to be here.

Kids who wanted to be here: :D

Kids who didn’t want to be here: *at home, reading biology textbook*

Tags:

#seriously we got so many comments from tour guides surprised that the kids actually gave a shit about the tour #oh look an original post #homeschool #my childhood #there are *occasional* places that won’t deal with anyone but an Official School #but most places that do stuff for schools are open to homeschool groups as long as you designate one parent as the liaison #I went to a lot of tours and art workshops and cooking classes #almost every week sometimes #(the parents generally tried to spread things out so that there weren’t *multiple* trips for the same age in the same week) #the more you know

Daily Planet cancelled at Discovery Canada

Link ~ ~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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{{Title link: http://www.tv-eh.com/2018/05/23/daily-planet-cancelled-at-discovery-canada/ }}

*Fuck*.

But, I, I just–

I only just got a chance to start watching it again! And now you’re telling me that that’s *it*, that I’ll have the *series finale* *tomorrow* and then *nothing*

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I…I guess I’ll go watch the penultimate episode. Not watching it won’t help anything.

…anyone have any recs for news sources focusing on neat sci-tech stuff?

Tags:

#apparently Bell can’t afford Daily Planet any more than I can #fuck #oh look an update #our home and cherished land #oh look an original post #the power of science

Swagging in Canada

Link ~ ~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

{{Title link: https://swaggingincanada.blogspot.com/ }}

Mom asked me to help spread the word about her new website, so here it is!

It’s a guide to earning supplemental income through Swagbucks (a site I previously mentioned in this post, though not by name). It’s got some pretty good tips, and while it’s aimed at Canadians, some of it still applies elsewhere.

(Fun fact: between the three of us who use it, we got about $1,500 from Swagbucks last year.)

Tags:

#she’s excited about making her own website #oh look an original post #adventures in human capitalism #signal boost #our home and cherished land

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Image ~ ~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

Pictured (an incomplete list): over a decade of diary entries, several years of dream journal, a few years of chat logs, copies of the comments I’ve left on blog posts (sadly incomplete, but far better than nothing), email archives for all three and a half of the email addresses I care about, tens of millions of words of fiction, a few hundred songs, a complete set of the Red Panda Adventures (including books and video comics), Wi-Fi maps for several cities I am relatively likely to find myself in, buggier and less-thorough Wi-Fi maps for the entirety of Canada and the United States, regular maps for every province/state I’m likely to visit in the normal course of events (Ontario, New York, Massachusetts), complete copies (including images) of several Tumblrs (including but not limited to mine), and the full text (but not images) of Wiktionary and Wikipedia.

Tags:

#I take great comfort in carrying my Useful Thing collection around with me all the time #and I have applied this same mindset to information #(the text portion of this post has been lying around in my drafts for so long that I’ve actually gotten a new smartphone since then) #((picture is of the new phone; taken using the old phone’s camera)) #(it’s still true it’s just that the portable version of my personal archive has a different physical embodiment now) #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #(currently three; I plan to sell the old one soon to recoup most of what I spent on the new one) #proud citizen of The Future #oh look an original post #in a couple of days I’ll do the next backup and this post itself will become part of my archive #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

Last workweek, for the first time, I made enough money to live on!  :D  o/

(it’s still a very useful supplement even when I get fewer hours than that, and while I have been known to push for (and usually receive) more hours, I’ve never presented it to my boss as being of vital importance)

(“Enough money to live on” is here defined at a relatively high level of abstraction: “if each individual in my household made this much money every week for a year, the total amount earned would equal the amount we spent in the previous calendar year (minus some things we’ve since cut)”. For 2018 (which uses 2017 data), this is about 17 minimum-wage-hours.)

(Hmm…*calculates*…ooh. Looks like ever since my most recent request for more hours (which was granted), most weeks I make right around the threshold for “enough to live on if no unusual expenses occur” (about 11.5 hours). Mom tries very hard to at least keep herself above that threshold (and encourages Dad to do the same), because she feels better about asking Brother for additional money if it’s only for occasional expenses, and she suspects it might cause less resentment in Brother too.)

Tags:

#the idea of feeling resentful about having to maintain the household *feels* ridiculous to me but there’s a good chance she’s right #I’ve grown pretty collectivist over the years of gradually increasing hardship #which is supposedly part of the standard coping mechanism for this and yet nobody else here exhibits nearly as much of it as I do #(the pathogen-stress people might say my potential for collectivism was closer to the surface and so more easily activated) #intuitively I think of individualistic approaches to budgeting as something you grow out of around puberty #but then I also intuitively think of shooter games as something you grow out of around puberty #so I guess I’m a terrible judge of these things #anyway I have to go get ready for work soon #(I think I’m getting 15 hours this week so still not bad) #oh look an original post #adventures in human capitalism #tag rambles #in which Brin has a job

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

Sort-of-tagged by @justice-turtle. Name ten songs you’re obsessed with:

(I’m going to mutate the “obsessed with” in a different direction than JT did, and do songs that have been important or special to me.)

(In rough chronological order of when they became important/special.)

(Disclaimer: I have not listened to the Youtube links to make sure they work properly.)

1. “Blue (Da Ba Dee)”, Eiffel 65. For something like seven years, I would occasionally get stuck in my head a snatch of tune I called the Ghost. I didn’t know if it was a song I’d heard once as a small child, or something my brain had come up with on its own. I had no idea where to even begin trying to look it up: the memory(?) did not come with any lyrics.

Then, at a bowling alley when I was fifteen, I heard it. At first, I feared it might slip away from me again, as there was too much background noise to make out the words. Fortunately, Mom recognised it, and gave me the name and artist. I was so happy to have finally identified it, I didn’t even care that I came in last in the game.

2. [redacted]. Since I heard this song, my life has never known peace. (Well, okay, it’s known a hell of a lot *less* peace than it would have otherwise.) I probably never would have handled this song very well, but it definitely made things worse that I first heard it while especially vulnerable. To this day, after all this time, it still triggers the fuck out of me. I heard *two seconds* of it in December (before noping the hell out of the store), and it took days for the pain to fade, for it to stop intruding into my thoughts.

I still get twitchy around radios sometimes, if I’m already in a bad way or if it’s a station that’s been known to play it. I still occasionally have nightmares about being forced to hear it. Sometimes even stations that exclusively play new songs worry me a little: having witnessed the depths of how awful a song can be, a proof of concept, there’s a little part of me that wonders how long until someone makes another just as bad.

(I take comfort in the possibility that this song was grandfathered in from a more psychologically fragile version of me, and that–knock on wood–it might not *be* possible to make another just as bad.)

((You know how radio stations these days have websites that tell you what their playlists for the past week have been? I want them to have pages where they tell you what they’re *going* to play. People who like being surprised can avoid looking at those pages, and people with song-related triggers can know when not to go grocery shopping (and can shop with confidence when they *do* go).))

3. “Follow You, Follow Me”, Genesis. There’d been previous Phil Collins songs I’d heard and liked, but this was the song that sparked my special interest in Phil Collins’ music. I heard it on the radio on my way to a Girl Scout event in the autumn of 2006; my Google-fu was terrible when I was 12/13, so it took me three months of wondering about it and over an hour of active searching for me to figure out which song it was.

Have you ever listened to a song you have a special interest in? It’s indescribable. It’s *such* a high.

I rationed it out carefully, knowing my general tendency to have weaker feelings about a song the more times I’ve heard it. (I didn’t account for the fact that my special interests generally only last a year or two, though, so I may have been a bit *too* careful.)

I don’t listen to this song much anymore, because it’s unnerving to hear how far it’s fallen now that the special interest has faded. Like, it’s *nice*, but it’s not *ecstatic* the way it was when I was 13.

4. “Come With Me”, Phil Collins. The only explicit lullaby* I’ve ever actually liked. I think because there was so little pressure in the circumstances around me listening to it: nobody ever forced me to listen to it, nobody hyped it up.

*personally I think “Hold on My Heart” is more soothing, but it’s not really *aiming* for that the way “Come With Me” is

5. “Rolling in the Deep”, Adele. I like 10’s pop a lot better than 00’s pop (I think because when I was a child, kids I disliked tended to be into 00’s pop, and even when I wasn’t in contact with them I viewed 00’s pop through a negative lens because of that), and to me this was the point of changeover between the two. It was refreshing to have a current Top 40 song that I actively *liked*.

6. “Never Let Me Go”, Florence and the Machine. While it’s never been ecstatic the way “Follow You, Follow Me” was, it’s been nice to finally have a favourite song again. And it was my introduction to Florence and the Machine, a very good band in general (though I have *still* not gotten around to finishing my first listen-through of their 2015 album and deciding which of the songs I like; I have not been good at adding new songs to my collection lately). Thank you, random viral Tumblr user who recced it.

7. “Bombay Sapphires”, Stevie Nicks/“Think About It”, Stevie Nicks/“Docklands”, Stevie Nicks. That might qualify as cheating, but all of these fall into the same category: songs whose lyrics didn’t used to make sense until suddenly clicking one day in my late teens/early twenties. You can pretty much trace my developing ability to parse poetic language by how many Stevie Nicks songs I understand. (Some of them I can still see how I would have gotten confused, but last week I was listening to “Bombay Sapphires” and wondering how I ever managed to not understand this song. (although on further reflection, I think the first-person/third-person switches might have been a big part of it))

8. “Sorry”, Assemblage 23. This song probably isn’t ~supposed~ to be about social justice, but it’s definitely about social justice.

Hearing this song for the first time was the tipping point that led to me cutting a lot of contact with old friends and old reading-material-sources. It dawned on me, listening to it, that it’s a *really* bad sign when you start identifying with songs about unhealthy relationships.

(Sample of the lyrics:

“I’m sorry I can’t always drown

In rivers of despair

A man forever broken by

A need for your repair

I’m sorry if the things I said

Were somehow misconstrued

I’m sorry, yes I’m sorry

So sorry

But not as sorry as you”)

9. “Sad Angel”, Fleetwood Mac. It was nice to turn the tables and have *me* introduce *Mom* to Fleetwood Mac. Giving a loved one [music from their favourite band] that they had no idea existed is priceless.

10. “Almost Home”, Sultan and Shepard. The newest addition to my music collection. Under normal circumstances it would have just been okay (maybe still good enough to keep around), but I first heard it all the way through during the first time I was in a different country from my parents*, so I was particularly prone to Feelings about reuniting loved ones. I remember listening to it on the radio at work the day they were due to come back, singing along and trying not to cry.

*Or rather, they were in a different country from me. I stayed put, they went away. (not by choice: there were family matters in America that needed taking care of in person)

Tags:

#oh look an original post #music #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #my childhood #long post #meme

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

*

Quite apart from whether their arguments are correct, the main problem I have with kink-critical and porn-critical feminism is that their definitions of “kink” and “porn” feel *really* weird to me.

I would say that I’m kinky and that I consume porn. And I think it’s reasonable of me to define these terms in ways that cover me (what terms should I use, if not these?). But I’m not into pain and I’m not into power exchange (let alone non-con) and I’m not into video, so I end up in this unnerving grey area where people *appear* to oppose me, but none of the reasons they give for *why* they oppose me actually *apply* to me, so do they oppose me or not?

Like, am I vanilla-by-default in their worldview, not being into the things they define as “kink”? In what universe do *I*, of all people, qualify as vanilla?

(…maybe the universe I encountered in this post?)

Tags:

#not really ”vagueblogging” so much as inspired by the general discourse going on around me lately #sexuality and lack thereof #discourse cw #oh look an original post #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #(sort of) #nsfw text

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

brin-bellway:

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Is it just me, or does adolescent brain development feel from the inside like getting better at *fear*?

Keep reading

They say the *next* stage of brain development is getting *less* susceptible to peer pressure. What the hell is *that* gonna be like?

I have some guesses, I think. Maybe you get so used to full-grown impulse control that you start taking it for granted, go so long without ever being at real risk of snapping that you start projecting your non-violence onto others the same way you once projected your violence onto them. “What will happen if I make this person angry” calculates (as it always did) as “what would I do if I were them and someone made me angry”, and since “I would hurt them” is no longer a serious possibility, you stop taking that possibility seriously in others (at least by default), and so the stakes are lower.

Tags:

#oh look an original post #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #violence cw #abuse cw?