oh look an update

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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justice-turtle:

Okay, I have done Math and also talked to a live Customer Service Person! Result: I think I need to raise about $200 to make the rent and cover my phone bill this month. (Y’all are *awesome*, just let me say; the reason I have nearly $500 left over from last month is totally down to y’all’s enthusiasm and generosity. <3)
In case anyone was worried, I am actually applicating to jobs as hard as I can – the mills of the corporate gods just grind really REALLY slowly, so even if I had an interview tomorrow there’s no way I’d have a paycheck by the first. So I’m going to put up dolly things at super-reduced prices, see if I can scrape up one more month to apply to ALL THE JOBS in. ;P
Signal boosting would be greatly appreciated. Also, I’m thinking I’ll list most of the remaining outfits at $10 each, so there are actually some pretty good deals here. :D #ufyh #americangirl #americangirldoll #agig #altagig #agsale2 #thediscounting

Tags:

#oh look an update #American Girl #sales #signal boost

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

brin-bellway:

What the fuck.

Why did the posts from after 5 PM (current time: 6:59 PM) just disappear from my dash?

I can see the notes for “brin-bellway reblogged your post: porous” and “somnilogical liked your post: porous”, but I can’t see either version of the post itself. (They do show up if I go to my blog directly.)

It wasn’t like this a few minutes ago.

The soft-refreshed dash I get after creating a new post from the dash shows newer posts. The dash that appears in the background of this reblog-drafting screen shows newer posts.

…and now properly loading/refreshing a dashboard window is showing them too.

???

¯_(ツ)_/¯

They vanished again, so I tried control-F5 and now they’re back.

Leaning towards some kind of cache issue.

Tags:

#oh look an update #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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brin-bellway:

What the fuck.

Why did the posts from after 5 PM (current time: 6:59 PM) just disappear from my dash?

I can see the notes for “brin-bellway reblogged your post: porous” and “somnilogical liked your post: porous”, but I can’t see either version of the post itself. (They do show up if I go to my blog directly.)

It wasn’t like this a few minutes ago.

The soft-refreshed dash I get after creating a new post from the dash shows newer posts. The dash that appears in the background of this reblog-drafting screen shows newer posts.

…and now properly loading/refreshing a dashboard window is showing them too.

???

¯_(ツ)_/¯

Tags:

#oh look an update #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #some sort of cache issue maybe?

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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eggheademporium:

eggheademporium:

eggheademporium:

writing-prompt-s:

All the gods of myth and legend are real, but having your prayers answered depends on discovering which god can hear you. You figured out which god is listening to your prayers, but they’re not what you expected.

Suzy was dissapointed. Most people her age had discovered their deity so far, and she was starting to think she was godless. She turned the next page of McBayers’ Little Book of Deities, and tried reading their names aloud to see if she’d get a reaction. It had taken her weeks just to get through Chinese spirits and deities, and had finally reached the first page of Egyptian Gods and you.

“Ammit? Amun? Anhur?” Nothing. Her heart slowly sank again. Three more tries, and she’d stop for now.

“Anubis?”

The ground shook. The lights in Suzy’s room flickered and went out. A single flame hovered in the middle of the room, and as it grew to a blaze it changed form. Within the blink of an eye, there was a tall figure standing in Suzy’s room. The body of a man, and the head of a jackal. His eyes shone bright as he peered at her.

 

WHAT IS IT, SUZY OF THE HOUSE MILLER?

“You’re the deity that answers my prayers?”

INDEED. I, ANUBIS, WHO RULES OVER THE LAND OF THE DEAD, IS HERE TO ANSWER YOUR REQUESTS.

Suzy thought for a moment. “O great and mighty Anubis who rules over the afterlife, can I please have a puppy?”

Anubis seemed taken aback.

IN THE CENTURIES THAT I HAVE BEEN PRAYED TO, THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I HAVE BEEN REQUESTED SOMETHING LIKE THIS. CHILD, HOW OLD ARE YOU?

“I’m eight and a half. My mommy says that if I can take care of a puppy, I can keep it.”

ARE YOU CERTAIN YOU DO NOT WISH FOR ME TO BRING PLAGUES UPON YOUR ENEMIES OR WEIGH A SOUL FOR YOU?

Suzy shook her head. “I want a puppy.”

CHILD, IN TRUTH THIS WISH I CANNOT GRANT. MY JOB HAS BEEN TO BRING PEACE AND LEAD SOULS INTO THE AFTERLIFE, NOTHING MORE. IF I WERE TO CREATE A HOUND FOR YOU, IT WOULD BE FORMED OF BONE AND SOUL ALONE.

Suzy thought for a second. She would have liked to have a nice fluffy puppy, but then she remembered how Aunt Marge’s Sphinx cat was still nice, even without fur.

“No fur is fine, as long as they don’t bite and make a mess.”

 

Anubis nodded, and raised a hand. Underneath his palm an intricate symbol appeared on the floor. It glowed bright, and the floorboards burst apart. Up sprang a massive skeletal dog, bigger than suzy herself. Its eye sockets held blue flame, and its jaw hang partly open in a perpetual grin. It slowly walked over to Suzy and nuzzled her.

 

“What does it eat?”

IT WILL NOT NEED SUSTENANCE, AND WANTS NOTHING MORE THAN TO SERVE ITS NEW MASTER. I HOPE THIS WILL SUFFICE.”

“I love it. Thank you, Anubis.”

Anubis looked slightly taken aback, but nodded peacefully.

FAREWELL FOR NOW, SUZY OF THE MILLERS. IF YOU EVER NEED ANYTHING ELSE YOU HAVE BUT TO ASK ME.

Suzy nodded, and ran over to her parents’ room to show them her new dog. She was pretty sure they couldn’t object to this pet.

A part 2,since this got some people interested.

Keep reading

Part 3, due to popular request. 

Keep reading

Tags:

#oh look an update #storytime #long post

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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brin-bellway:

Red Panda reaction-blogging update:

I listened to “Death From Above” and “The Judas Boats” on my traditional Saturday afternoon walk yesterday.

First of all, while I miss the primeverse*, I think I am starting to warm up to this one, or maybe it’s starting to warm up to itself and I’m sensing that. The Red Panda is starting to feel more…himself, in spots, and I’m not sure if that’s a character thing, or if Taylor’s gotten more confident at voice acting in later episodes, or what.

Also…okay, look. For my readers who have not listened to the Red Panda Adventures, and who–like me–are often very sensitive to authors’ politics shining through in their fiction, I want to assure you that it is pretty subtle. There’s no anvils, there’s almost no pressuring even by the standards of someone who can hear SJ dogwhistles a little too well.

That being said, there is nevertheless a clear sense, while listening to the primeverse Red Panda Adventures, that a liberal wrote this. Not enough to be pressury, just enough to be…home-y. I get the feeling that, while I may not know what makes this author tick (I often have trouble with grokking what makes a given liberal tick), I do know what he considers socially acceptable and what he doesn’t, and I can trust him to stay within those bounds as much as he can given the setting, and to provide a sense that the narrative disapproves in those times he can’t.

The pilots don’t feel like a liberal wrote them. They feel like…like an apathetic centrist wrote them. Someone whose birth subculture has not much overt bigotry but a lot of low-level background stuff, who might very well come to the conclusion that this was still horrible if he ever gave it some serious thought, but who never has given it that thought. There’s these little moments in the pilots of…other people might call them “microaggressions”, but I think of them as culture shock. Those little off-balance moments where you realise that your interlocutor’s standards of social acceptability are different from yours, that you can’t predict (can’t trust) what they’re going to do and say as well as you thought you could.

It’s not my place to ask**, but I wonder if maybe Taylor was an apathetic centrist at the time, and moved to liberal-land sometime in the mid-00’s. If he did, it’s fascinating that it shows so clearly. If not, it’s still very interesting that it feels like he did.

Alternatively, maybe it feels apathetic-centrist because it was intended to be played on mainstream radio for a “mainstream” (thus presumed apathetic-centrist) audience, and in podcasts he could be more himself. I think I’m going to have to listen to the Season One Spectacular again, particularly the bits about how the Red Panda came to be.

—

*I was going to switch to some other podcast for my walks for a while once I was done with Red Panda ones, but I think I might have to go straight into a re-listen.

**I don’t really want other people to ask, but it occurred to me that somebody might take it upon themself to ask anyway. If so, please do not link me to him. There’s some stuff in my Red Panda tag that would be very awkward for the author to see.

(Okay, upon reflection I can think of one anvil: the Chinese-laundromat bit in The Crime Cabal. But it was short, and also in a book rather than the main audio series.)

—

Also, @theshadiertwin, I wouldn’t have noticed the hurt/comfort-ness and Red/Baboon/Anna potential on my own, but I think I can see what you mean.

Tags:

#oh look an update #Red Panda Adventures

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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Yeah, going to need mobile data.

I mean, to be fair, I haven’t really had a chance to map the business district yet, and business districts tend to be better about Wi-Fi coverage. But I mapped my neighbourhood this morning*, and found…nothing. Every other residence was locked. Every non-residence didn’t have a hotspot.

Still, I’m glad I did it. Now I know, and knowing where Wi-Fi isn’t is almost as important as knowing where it is. (I say “almost” because it’s more likely to lead to people trying to re-invent the wheel: anyone else looking at the public map won’t be able to distinguish “somebody mapped this area and found nothing” from “nobody has mapped this area yet”, although they might be able to guess if they see that the areas surrounding that area have clearly been mapped.)

I also learned more about hotspot default names. The stuff I looked up about it later wasn’t super clear, but reading between the lines, it looks like Cisco got sick of being “linksys” all the time, and more recent Linksys routers are named using a random generator that spits out things like “AquaCedar” and “BusyEagle”. (When I was in another town running errands, I saw a network named “FastDove”, and wondered why they chose that name. Now, I think that they didn’t choose it: it came that way.)

Almost all of the networks with this naming scheme (I saw one that didn’t have this; my guess is they opted out) have another network named “[name]-guest”. The guest network claims to be open, but when you try to load a webpage on it, it redirects to a password prompt.

(My stance on residences with password-locked hotspots is: passwords are, first and foremost, a “Keep Out” sign, and as a general rule I respect requests to “Keep Out” even if they’re unenforced. If you have a Wi-Fi password, I will make no attempt to figure out what it is, even if it would turn out to be “password”.

(If a non-residence (business, community centre, etc) happily gives out its password to anyone who walks in the door, I will happily give out its password too. Otherwise, I treat them like locked residences and don’t pry further. I even phrase my initial questioning as “Do you have Wi-Fi?” when I already know that they do, so that they have the easy out of answering “No, we don’t have it” when the real answer is “Yes, but you can’t have any.”))

Anyway, after three or four [adjective][animal/plant]-guests that weren’t actually open, I’m thinking I won’t even bother to try future instances of the category. Again, useful information.

—

Oh, also, I did the factory reset I was planning on. Setting up my phone went much faster and smoother the second time (except Yahoo Calendar, but that’s Mom’s fault because it’s Mom’s calendar), and while I haven’t gotten all of my space back (I suspect the phone was lying when it said some of the built-in apps were removable; I think that’s enough to explain the remaining discrepancy), in general I am cautiously optimistic about the state of my hard drive. *knocks on wood*

—

*When you’ve lived in Canada for over nine years, +1°C starts to feel like reasonable outdoor weather.

Tags:

#it’s supposed to be +8C on Saturday #the peak of the usual January thaw #looking forward to that #hoping to get a lot of mapping done this weekend #it’s about as enjoyable as I thought it would be #treasure-hunt/seeing-into-normally-hidden-layer-of-existence*/act-of-public-service rolled into one #(*chalk another one up on the ”humans as fae” tab) #oh look an original post #oh look an update #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now

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~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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Yesterday afternoon, upon further reflection, it occurred to me that whatever Mysterious Problem is keeping me from 1.5 GB of my hard drive space could very well have other ill effects. It’s probably worth at least *attempting* to eliminate the problem before I resort to routing around it.

…of course, it would have to be a *Monday* that I conclude this, wouldn’t it.

Tags:

#no brain it’s okay #we don’t have to Fix Everything Right Now #the phone’s current functionality level is good enough to get us through the rest of the week #(if it makes you feel any better) #(it’s supposed to be a windchill of 0 and non-precipitating tomorrow) #(that might be good enough for at least a *little* Wi-Fi mapping) #((…except since the time I drafted this post the highest windchill temperature has dropped to -1)) #((*and* it’s more like -3 at the time of day I would actually go out)) #((normally I don’t tend to mind being cooped up inside that much as long as I have Internet)) #((but not right now)) #oh look an original post #oh look an update #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now

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~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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Brother’s identical phone model hasn’t had this problem. All of his internal storage is accounted for.

Options:

1. Perform a factory reset in an attempt to reclaim the missing 1.5 GB. Cons: requires mostly starting over on configuring the phone to my liking (though I’ll be able to skip some of the problems I ran into along the way, now knowing their solutions), might not work (whatever mysterious thing caused me to lose the 1.5 GB could just as easily happen again; I can’t learn from my mistake if I don’t know what the mistake was). (Note: re-configuring the phone will probably consume some time I would otherwise have spent working, perhaps $1 – 10 in opportunity costs depending on how successful I would have been in finding suitable jobs to claim.)

2. Configure the SD card I already have as internal storage. Cons: slows down the phone by an unknown amount (may or may not be significant), requires wiping the SD card and re-downloading everything I currently have stored on it, causes the real internal storage to become user-inaccessible (but still in use behind the scenes, so I might find that I have a need to see it and can’t), originally had trouble getting Dropbox to work on internal!SD but I think I *might* (maybe) know what I did wrong. Other people tell horror stories of losing their data to their internal-configured SD card breaking, but any data of any importance has at least two additional copies (one on laptop, one in cloud), so I’m not too concerned by this possibility.

3. Convince Brother to swap SD cards with me, and configure it as internal storage: turns out his *is* high-speed, and currently external. Cons: the non-slowing cons of 2, plus Brother might not agree.

4. Buy the same SD card Brother has, configure as internal. Cons: the non-slowing cons of 2, plus costs $30.

(Note: Brother says he is *much* more skilled at taking this style of phone apart–he proceeded to tear the back off of his phone to demonstrate, making it look easy–and thinks that as long as I wait until a time he’s available, he can perform any SD card swapping I need done without any trouble.)

(Pros of each option: doesn’t suffer the cons of the other options, except where specified.)

Currently leaning towards attempting them in the order 2, 1, 3, 4. If I have to resort to option 1, try to arrange my schedule so that the re-configuring occurs over a weekend.

Tags:

#I don’t expect it to be very easy to arrange to do a factory reset over the weekend #unless I happen to give up on Plan A at the right time of week #there’s already enough things I want to do with this phone that I’m being forced to wait on #it’d be hard to convince myself to wait when I *don’t* have to #oh look an original post #oh look an update #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now

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~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

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Updates:

SD cards turn out to be a lot more complicated on Android 6.0 than they were on 4.2, so it took longer than I thought it would, but I’ve finished the transfer. All of my stuff (give or take a weather app) is on my new phone, and my old phone is now officially Mom’s.

—

Re: Internet access, it remains to be seen how much can be done with option 1–I might still use it at least partially–but it’s looking like the primary answer is going to be option 3.

Mom was remarkably agreeable to switching to my old smartphone as her primary cell phone, under two conditions: that nobody expects her to use the smartphone to anywhere near its full functionality (she doesn’t want to have to deal with getting to know a new kind of computer, at least not beyond a shallow level), and that I figure out a reasonably practical way for her to carry it around with her (she currently carries her phone in a flip-phone-sized pouch in her backpack).

(Dad suggested sticking her SIM card into a smartphone when I wanted to use data, then putting it back in the flip phone afterward for routine use. I said I didn’t think flip phones had removable SIM cards. Turns out the real answer is in between: *modern* flip phones have removable SIM cards, but her phone is so old it predates PC Mobile flip phones becoming the type of phone that has a removable SIM. In order to switch a SIM card back and forth, she’d need to get a new flip phone; if she’s going to change primary phones anyway, why spend money on an additional phone when we have a perfectly good smartphone available?)

It seems we can’t get a monthly or yearly graph of how much phone credit she’s actually using, but judging from the amount of credit she currently has built up, over the six years she’s had her account she’s used an average of ~$70/year. Put another way: if the average usage rate holds, we could buy a $10/month basic data plan May – October and not run out of spare credit for about 6 years. That’s long enough to be getting on with; hell, for all I know, I’ll have a need for my own phone plan by then.

I already borrow Mom’s phone on those occasions I need access to the cell infrastructure. This will just be an extension of that.

I’m not going to take any action on obtaining a data plan until it gets close to spring. If all goes well, Mom will keep her old flip phone for the rest of the winter, and she’ll have some time to get used to having a smartphone before trying to do any actual phone stuff with it.

(It’ll have to be Brother who gives her the tour of how to do actual phone stuff on a smartphone. I’ve never done it, after all.)

Tags:

#I looked it up and it turns out PC is actively encouraging people with SIM-less phones to upgrade to SIM models #so they can consolidate their networks #for us personally I consider this a good sign #because it means it *probably* won’t be a huge hassle to switch her account to a new phone #people usually make things easy to do when they’re trying to convince you to do them #hopefully running a mobile hotspot will also be non-frustrating #*knocks on wood* #oh look an original post #oh look an update #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #(and not three) #in which Brin learns to speak Pokemon

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