(I was too busy having a cold to say this on the actual day (I’m on the mend now), but:)
I have now lived in Canada for 10 years!
Tags:
#anniversaries #our home and cherished land #illness mention #oh look an original post
oh look an original post
[status: reasonably knowledgeable about menial Internet labour, very slightly knowledgeable about cryptocurrency]
Trying to figure out if there are any better ways to sell my computers’ processing power than what I’m already doing, and I keep hearing mentions of cryptocurrency mining but also people saying it’s not worth the electricity it’s printed on except in edge cases.
Are there any cases where mining pays more per hour (after subtracting electricity cost) than running advertisement videos in the background* without investing four-digit quantities of money into high-end equipment**, or are the benefits of mining just privacy principles, (possibly?) slightly less maintenance required to keep it running, and high scaleability?
(Or even just a matter of different social circles? Like, the “techies who are into security” know about cryptocurrency mining but not ad videos, and the “housespouses who are into frugality” know about ad videos but not cryptocurrency mining, and there isn’t enough intermixture for both to be common knowledge?)
((…if the only reason you weren’t running ad videos for spare change is because you didn’t know that was a thing, hit me up and I’ll teach you))
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*Laptop: ~3 – 5 cents per hour, for 10W (if I was going to have the laptop on anyway) or 25W (if I wasn’t). (so, roughly a tenth of a cent, give or take) Smartphones pay more per active hour (~15c) for *presumably* less electricity (haven’t tested my smartphone’s power usage), but usually have a daily cap, so you can only get a few active hours per day.
**Empirically, I’m willing to invest roughly a hundred dollars into more equipment to run paid processing with, and only after I’ve had a chance to test the task out at smaller scales to make sure it works well. (And I’m more willing if I can buy the stuff off of Amazon, since I continue to have more Amazon credit than I know what to do with.)
Tags:
#there are enough techies-who-are-into-security amongst my followers that someone might know #oh look an original post #adventures in human capitalism
Any advice on how to break the “depressed because I can’t get a job, can’t get a job because I’m depressed” cycle?
(…any advice on how to convince a depressed third party to actually *take* the advice from the first question?)
Tags:
#oh look an original post #you would think given that damn near everyone I know is or has been depressed #I would be better at dealing with depressed people #but…it’s hard to phrase this in a way that doesn’t sound bad #I don’t mean it in a bad way #but while I *like* my friends and I do want them to do well #the harm done to *me* by stuff ruining *their* lives is indirect at most #and that gives me enough distance from the problem to be understanding and stuff #Dad’s inability to let go of the idea of being The Provider and settle for merely contributing to a shared pool of income #(and therefore refusing to even apply for jobs that would ~merely~ let him pull his own weight rather than pulling *four* people’s weight) #is *directly* making it harder for me to afford my necessities #(or rather is failing to lengthen the amount of time left before affording my necessities becomes abruptly very difficult) #((I suppose the nuclear-war analogy has *some* truth to it but I still think the global-warming analogy is more adaptive)) #((and likely closer overall)) #tag rambles #venting #(the tag-ramble part) #(but no really if you have any advice please let me know) #adventures in human capitalism
Also listened to “The Sweet Tooth”, which reminds me very much of reading “The Glad Hosts”.
They both feel strongly like somebody took a cliche, paint-by-numbers erotic-horror story, stripped out the conventionally-sexual content*, and gave it to a vanilla audience who wouldn’t recognise its pattern.
And so you’re like “…do they know? Is that what they did, or did they independently reinvent this standard plot?”
(IIRC, there’s an RPA behind-the-scenes bit that suggests they didn’t know, and that they did independently reinvent this plot. Which is interesting, in a convergent-evolution kind of way. “The lure is a chocolate shop, and women liking chocolate is for whatever reason more of a Thing than it is for men” and “this story is porn aimed at gynephiles” both lead to the same result of all-female targets.)
*But didn’t do a complete job of it: you can still see traces. Mai’s “love erotic”; the way the shop preys exclusively on women.
Tags:
#I mean yeah the villain loses in this one #but that *would* be a side effect of translating the plot from a genre where the villain usually wins to a genre where they never do #Red Panda Adventures #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text? #reactionblogging #tmi? #for some reason it took me longer to notice with Glad Hosts than with Sweet Tooth #Sweet Tooth I remember thinking a few minutes into my first listen ”I swear I’ve read porn with this premise” #Glad Hosts felt *vaguely* familiar and it wasn’t until afterward that I realised #”oh this is basically just cliche dime-a-dozen mind-altering-parasite porn but with the conventional sexuality removed” #”I didn’t like this plot the *first* six times I read it” #(Sweet Tooth was much less horror-y so I liked it a lot better) #(have I mentioned lately I hate horror?) #oh look an original post
Reached “When Darkness Falls” in my Red Panda Adventures re-listen.
*gently lowers head onto table*
oh god
he’s so tiny
and he has no idea
(and that police officer that blows him off
was that
the same police officer who talks approvingly to the Black Eagle near the end)
Tags:
#Red Panda Adventures #reactionblogging #oh look an original post #you know #in terms of the number and magnitude of positive consequences #sparing Harry Kelly’s memory was probably the *single best move* the Red Panda ever made
Speaking of which:
During the less thought-requiring parts of my job (sweeping and such), I keep thinking about that Suffering vs Oblivion post. Specifically, the bit where a large fraction of respondents say they would rather die than spend every waking moment of the rest of their life working in fast food.
When I first read that post, I’d never worked in fast food. I *suspected* that given only those two options I’d rather live, certainly a strong enough suspicion to give it a shot, but without more experience I couldn’t be sure.
Now, about a month in, I’m more confident that I’d rather live. My time spent at work has been positive utility: not *ideal*, sure, but all else equal I wouldn’t replace it with unconsciousness. Not even close. And most of the negative bits are the times I’m not sure what exactly I ought to be doing, which get less frequent the more experience with the job I have (and I expect this decreasing-frequency trend to continue).
Tags:
#although to be fair I’ve had pretty decent co-workers so far #and I work in a small* Canadian* town #(*+1 modifier to customer niceness) #so thus far the interpersonal aspect has been pretty much a non-issue #*knocks on wood* #in which Brin has a job #(a better paying job than the last one) #(and with more hours) #(though I might try transcription again at some point if I find the time) #(last I checked there was hardly ever anything but I think that might be from people using it as a summer job) #(note to any relevantly magical entities or somesuch: this post does not in itself constitute permission to sentence me to spend the rest of #my waking time working in fast food) #(whether I’d want to do that depends on what the other options are) #(it’s significantly better than death but not as good as the life I have now) #death tw #oh look an original post #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #adventures in human capitalism
(This is a complete tangent on a post that’s already long, so I think I’ll split it off.)
You know, while I *had* considered the possibility that my and Dad’s differing baseline approaches to household finances was a generational thing, I’d figured it was because he’s from one of the few patches of space-time where single-breadwinner middle-class households were feasible, common, expected, and he still aims for this no-longer-practical goal. I’d never thought of it in terms of differing conceptions of the *apocalypse*, and yet it fits.
For him (part of what the post calls “Generation Jones”), the central example of an apocalypse is total nuclear war. Quick, sudden, binary, inescapable. Either humanity goes abruptly extinct or it continues on as before, and there is not a damn thing you can do about it either way (unless you are (or can become) one of the few people with power over it).
For me, the central example of an apocalypse is global warming. Long, slow, gradual, mitigate-able. The world has been ending for a hundred years, and it will keep ending for a hundred more. Humanity is unlikely to go *entirely* extinct even in the worst cases, and there are many possible cases other than the worst ones. There are many opportunities (most tiny, some larger; large ones mostly only available to the powerful, but everyone has at least *some* opportunities) to make the apocalypse be just a little milder, or work just a little slower.
The goal is something a bit like longevity escape-velocity. You’re never safe from destruction, not truly. You’re only ever buying time. But you can use the time you buy to buy yourself *more* time, and so on, and with some luck and a lot of diligence, you might never get around to dying. You might even live long enough for the powerful to come up with a way to truly fix things, but even if that doesn’t happen, you can still survive, though with death always nipping at your heels.
As above, so below.
Tags:
#I say this having earlier today done a [s]three-hour[/s] 3.5-hour shift at a fast-food place #(it was going to be three hours but we were busy so I stayed late) #thereby obtaining enough income (money and free food) to cover ~3.4% of the total weekly expenses of my household #(probably more actually) #(that percentage is based on 2016 average expenses) #(and we’ve been gradually getting better at frugality over time) #(likely enough to be a bigger factor than inflation) #I was raised with an every-bit-counts mindset towards saving the world and I approach saving my family the same way #oh look an original post #death tw #scrupulosity tw #I feel like this probably deserves some additional warning tag but I’m not sure what #apocalypse cw? #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #adventures in human capitalism
Too far north for totality, but we still get a 78%-coverage partial eclipse.
First picture taken a few minutes before peak with a plain smartphone camera, second picture taken a few minutes after peak with the same camera pointed through three pairs of sunglasses simultaneously.
I learned that eclipse photography should be left to the professionals, but hey, at least I have some souvenirs even if you can’t actually tell out of context why I was taking these pictures. (When I look for it, it seems like it might be a bit less glare-y in the part covered by the moon? But that might be wishful thinking.)
As for non-camera observation, I didn’t have any proper gear (I realised we were in the partial-eclipse zone not very far in advance). I settled for a couple very quick glances at the sun through two pairs of sunglasses. (As always, the dose makes the poison. The damage from that dosage level was transient and has already faded away, same as it did the couple times I glanced at the sun as a kid.) In those instants, I just managed to register that there was a clearly visible dark patch covering the top-left portion.
The general quality of the light was within normal variation.
—
All in all, would have been more fun with eclipse glasses and a more suitable camera, but pretty good for what would otherwise have been a normal afternoon. And I have now officially Seen a Solar Eclipse.
Tags:
#solar eclipse #(I was going to use ”eclipse”) #(but apparently my previous lunar-eclipse posts were specifically ”lunar eclipse”) #(so I’m going to maintain the pattern) #I think I have now fulfilled my Living Dangerously quotas for quite some time #and shall return to my usual caution #oh look an original post #I’m supposed to be doing math homework I’d better get back to that #(which also means I have not caught up on my dash and will not be doing so for a couple more hours) #(so I don’t know what liveblogging the rest of my dash is up to)
(This post is inspired by @industrialbruise‘s post here on pollution hyposensitivity, but is not itself a roleplay post.)
Does anyone else reading this get the thing where after touching something you suspect to be germy, the part of your body that touched it feels a little tingly? Like your brain’s way of setting a reminder to be careful what that bit touches until you get a chance to clean it.
(I saw the bit about “it’s kind of like. everybody else has a whole section of their brain devoted to ‘is this clean’ and i’m just tryin to process it along with everything else”, and I thought god, I think I might actually *have* that section, it’s the one in charge of that tingling thing.)
Tags:
#Amenta #(sort of) #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #oh look an original post
(I don’t think there are any revealing details here, but under a cut just in case)
Did you know the Ontario Energy Board has an electricity welfare program? (they don’t technically use the word “welfare”, but that’s the general idea)
Because *I* didn’t.
Did you know that Ontario-Energy-Board-regulated electricity providers have different peak hours in summer and fall (May 1st – October 31st) than they do in winter and spring?
Because *I* didn’t.
(Specifically, they flip which times are mid-peak and which are on-peak. Which means if you’ve been trying to move some of your on-peak electricity usage to mid-peak times, you need to change your strategy when the seasonal rate changes or you’ll end up making things *worse*.)
So the bad news is, my family’s been severely fucking up our attempts to reduce our electric bill for three and a half months, and moderately fucking it up for years. Good news is, now that we actually know what our cards are and how to play them, between that and the recent drops in electricity rates we can probably cut our electric bill to, like, $10 – $20/month (our 2016 average was ~$130/month; 2017’s been more like $100 so far, but they just dropped the rates again, so an equivalent amount of usage would now cost ~$80).
I don’t think I actually have any Ontarian readers, but the rest of you might want to check if anything analogous is going on in your area. That’s a lot of money that could be going towards food, shelter, etc.
Tags:
#shown above: an example of why I haven’t played Flight Rising since December #why play dragon capitalism when you’re playing *real* capitalism #(I suspect in the long run I’m going to end up with some serious miser issues) #(we’ve been bleeding savings to some extent or another for so long) #(I’ve gotten used to the idea that my future selves will always need my money more than I do) #(that the overall trajectory of one’s finances is always downward) #(but the sooner you start acting as if you’re already broke the longer it will take for you to become *actually* broke) #(and the softer a landing it will be when you inevitably get there) #(so if I ever end up in a position of true financial stability) #((rather than the one-time cash infusions that have kept us afloat so far)) #(I’m going to have a hell of a time convincing myself of it) #(I think part of me’s always going to believe that the good times are temporary and I need to be preparing for when they end) #anyway I’m glad I double-checked the electricity-price rules #there is probably some warning tag I should put on this but I am not sure what #oh look an original post #the more you know #tag rambles #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #adventures in human capitalism
Brinens and Things 