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brin-bellway:

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When I read stuff about What Pre-Pubescent Sexuality Is Like, the traits they describe tend to divide up into “I was never like that” (example: no sense of propriety) and “I’m still like that” (example: sexuality as having to do with oneself, not something interpersonal).

When I read stuff about What Adult Sexuality Is Like, the traits they describe tend to divide up into “I’ve always been like that” (example: capacity for sexual arousal) and “I’m still not like that” (the thing that comes to mind is just the inverse of the still-like-that pre-pubescent one, but there’s probably others).

The transition from pre-pubescent sexuality to adult sexuality is called “awakening”.

What I am saying here is: I, a dozing fetishist, have a perpetually half-awake sexuality.

If there is a God, He loves puns.

Tags:

#sexuality and lack thereof #people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me #oh look an original post #puns #nsfw text?

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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(pictured above: mango smoothie and blueberry muffin)

Everything tastes better when it’s free!

I’m so glad I looked up birthday promotions a couple weeks ago. (Especially since you have to sign up for these a week in advance, presumably to encourage people to give their *actual* birthdays and not just whatever the current day is.)

(I mean, I had to subscribe to their respective newsletters, but I have a dedicated email address specifically for receiving newsletters from people who might give me free stuff, so no big deal. And both stores were on the way to the Chinese takeout place, so the fuel cost was negligible.)

Tags:

#adventures in human capitalism #birthday #oh look an original post #food

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

Oh god, I’m seriously tempted to get into a fight with these smug idiots.

Somebody please stop me.

(*chants* “they’re the ones with all the power here, you can tell by how strenuously they insist that they’re powerless, they will beat you to an even bloodier pulp than they’ve already done and walk away without a scratch no matter *what* you do to them”)

Tags:

#just once I want somebody to look at me the way that I look at them #with paralytic terror #just once I want to win a fight #just once I want someone to grovel at my feet and beg me to stop hurting them #too broken even to fight back #I want the interactions I always have sooner or later with everyone #but I want to be on the *other* side of it this time #I’ll even be merciful enough to let them grovel openly rather than couching it in euphemisms #that’s more mercy than they show me #venting #vagueblogging #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #abuse cw #oh look an original post

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While I do *have* an internal time sense, said sense tends to believe external cues over its own lying eyes.

The upside is, when springing forward I’ve usually adjusted by the end of the first day, and almost always by the end of the second. All I have to do is look at clocks a lot and follow my routine at least somewhat aggressively.

The downside is, every year at falling back I try to shift my sleep schedule back with it, and it never works.

Tags:

#slept 12:30 – 9:30 last night #which is more or less what time I slept a week ago #there was a while there where I was sleeping 12 – 9 and I liked that better #I thought using DST to help would make it easier to go back to that #but no if I’m going to do that it’ll have to be the hard way #(although 12:30 – 9:30 isn’t *all* that bad) #oh look an original post #Daylight Savings Time #(I don’t know how helpful my internal-clock malleability is for non-DST jet lag) #(because I have never left my time zone) #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #(sort of)

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So you know how I was complaining about not being able to find a use for my Amazon credit? Look what I found yesterday:

Amazon US! has!! a gift-card store!!! and most of them are purchaseable using Amazon credit!!!!

!!!!!

(AFAICT there’s not even a markup! except on the Visa, but the Visa is one of the few you can’t buy with gift-card credit anyway)

The bad news is, it looks like none of them are stores I normally shop at. But some of them (such as Starbucks and Panera) would only require going a *little* out of my way, and in general this vastly increases the likelihood that Amazon credit will become useful in the future.

(there are occasional complaints of cards arriving empty, but
most reviews are excellent even after the “not bothering to review
because nothing to complain about” effect, and most of the empty-card
people get it sorted out eventually (note that the cards are sold by
Amazon directly and not shady third-party sellers), so it’s
probably okay but one might want to check the balance before trying to
use it just in case)

(also they Technically Don’t Ship to Canada, but who cares, half of them aren’t even physical and I can just funnel them through my cousins anyway)

I encourage anyone who has excess Amazon-US credit lying around or otherwise gets a discount on Amazon purchases (especially if they’re a US resident, so they don’t need a funnelling contact) to investigate this themselves. None of them are stores *I* normally shop at, but they might be stores *you* normally shop at.

Tags:

#adventures in human capitalism #oh look an original post #the more you know #home of the brave

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So because of Reasons (I maybe shouldn’t go into much detail publicly, but it involves a side gig), I have been exposed to a lot of romance novels (often erotic, though not always) over the last few months, and it has been an Experience.

1. Did you know that in mainstream fiction circles, “MC” stands for “motorcycle club” rather than “mind control”? Because I did not know that, and I did a hell of a double-take when I first saw an “MC romance”.

2. Relatedly (or I guess *not* relatedly, if you are someone who looks at “MC fiction” and thinks “motorcycle club”), I did not expect memory play to be so popular. I mean, they put a different spin on it, of course, but still. Quite a few people in these have glorious sex with their true loves and then later wind up mind-wiped (I think usually by Fiction Head Trauma) and the true love has to Remind them *nudgewink*. And that’s not even counting other variations on the theme.

3. Wow, is a lot of this stuff dark. And even when it’s not dark, it’s often embarrassment-squicky, or people are doing something ~taboo~ and worrying about getting caught. It seems like even people who aren’t *specifically* marketing to taboo fetishists casually assume that something being taboo is a point in its favour, sexiness-wise (why would worry be sexy?). (And apparently breath play? Although that might have just been one person. But she seemed to think her audience would agree, without having selected her audience for hypoxyphilics beforehand.)

4. Overall, when I see stuff about what’s up in popular erotica, I am left with a sense of “wait, *these* are supposed to be the normal vanilla people? they’re *way* more out-there than I am.” (Also, that a lot of the problems† that I thought were specific to primarily-non-con-oriented kinks (or even specific to hypnosis, like memory play) are apparently happening all over. Not that I was expecting *this* porn to appeal to me anyway, but still, I feel some solidarity with the people who *would* like this stuff if only it were fluffier. Though there’s still *some* fluff out there, of course (just as there is here).)

Did something happen to, like, the sexual Overton window while I wasn’t looking? Is it subcultural effects–but I would expect subcultural effects to work in the *opposite* direction if anything. Or outgroup bias: everyone thinks the [people who are only into central examples of sex]†† are Over There in Normal Land, and that it’s just their own circle that’s kinky? Maybe the central-example-of-sex people just don’t read much erotica, even mainstream stuff? Maybe things were *always* like this and I’m just naive? (I think I have vaguely heard that taboos-are-sexy was always like that, though I don’t understand why.)

—

†I am using “problem” in the subjective sense here, to mean “trends that make porn less suited to my tastes”.

††I am no longer confident in my sense of what “vanilla” means, so I’m trying to avoid it here.

Tags:

#??? #sexuality and lack thereof #oh look an original post #amnesia cw

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Unexpected side effect of fast-food job: listening to current Top 40 music while sitting at home feels very disorienting.

Tags:

#brain: ”wait if this song is playing how come we’re not at work” #”shouldn’t we at least be standing up?” #not related to the previous post #oh look an original post #in which Brin has a job #music

Video ~ ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

God, the Internet is amazing.

I was thinking fondly of a song from a childhood video game, but I could not recall how the song went or the exact name of the game. And I thought “Maybe I can fix that.”

Armed only with the information “there was this M&M-themed game on CD-ROM, and the song was the background music for level 5″, it took me all of a couple of minutes to track this down. (If you would like to skip to the best part, that is at 1:03. I tried linking to that timestamp, but it looks like you can’t do that with video posts.)

Bonus: apparently the game disc’s ISO is available from the Internet Archive.

(I wonder if Windows 7 is backwards-compatible with Windows 95 games, or if I would have to take stronger measures?)

Tags:

#games #my childhood #music #oh look an original post #food mention #proud citizen of The Future

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(I feel like @itsblehnedict might find this interesting)

[under the cut for non-fourth-wall-breaking infohazards, and also cordyceps spoilers if anyone still cares]

So in my dream this morning I was playing a video game (it might have been a VR game, but the way my dreams work all media is VR media, so I’m not sure if it was *meant* to be VR), and part of the plot was an elephant-induced apocalypse†. I thought it was neat how the game handled that.

(Note: in this game, the elephant is foodborne as well as airborne, and was deliberately developed and put into place by some evil conspiracy. Never reached the part where they explain what the conspiracy was trying to accomplish.)

As you would expect, the game tracks physical infection and memetic infection separately. You can actually survive for quite a while after eating a poisoned cookie, if you play in exactly the right way to keep your character oblivious to the apocalypse going on around them.

But it’s really hard to do that and people normally only stumble into it by accident, because the game performs (limited, one-way) fourth-wall breaking.

If this is not your first playthrough to reach the elephant plotline, the game *knows that you know* (because you’ve played before), and will flag you as memetically contaminated even if your character has no idea.

But it goes farther than that. The plot flag that triggers the apocalypse is finishing your dinner that night. (You then–if you don’t have other plans for the night–go to eat poisoned cookies and watch a poisoned movie with your family, and many other people in other places are doing the same. If you do have other plans, your family does it without you.) There is no in-game indication that an apocalypse will start then (in the main branch of the plotline, you actually *die* that night, and are resurrected by plot stuff later). If the game notices you building a bunker, buying gas masks, avoiding finishing your dinner to buy yourself more time to prepare††, the game *realises you must have read a walkthrough* and *flags you as memetically contaminated* (because why would you be doing this stuff if you didn’t know what was coming?).

—

†For anyone who has not read Cordyceps but still wants to read this post, the short version is that “the elephant” is a disease that is fatal when symptomatic but can only become symptomatic *if you know the disease exists*. If you’re infected without ever learning about the disease, it lies dormant for a few months and then dies out, unless you learn about it during that timeframe. (They call it “the elephant” because it’s pink and you mustn’t think about it.)

††If you say you aren’t hungry and put your dinner in the fridge, the “finished dinner” flag is not set and the apocalypse is postponed. You can eat other stuff later, and as long as it isn’t *that* particular meal the flag is not set. Letting the food rot sets the flag, but you can still buy yourself about three days this way.

Tags:

#cordyceps tcftog #illness tw #apocalypse cw #infohazards #oh look an original post #dreams