#you jest‚ but for the worst bits of spring and autumn N95s don’t cut it anymore #(at least not if you’ll be outside for longer than about an hour) #you really do gotta go full Alan Turing #(…well okay technically I don’t currently use *eye* protection) #(but anyway) #comics #art #allergies #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #proud citizen of The Future #poison cw?
You get to open a video-game style character creation screen and customise your body at will, to anything within range of human variation (no cat ears, sorry). This includes letting you set a new biological age, get rid of any physical health issues, and so on. Your new appearance seems unremarkable to anyone who knows you, all government databases with your picture are adjusted, etc.
You get 150 000 USD every year for the rest of your life without having to do anything for it. You don’t pay taxes on this money, it adjusts with inflation automatically, it appears entirely legitimate to any authorities, etc.
what do you choose, and also, are you trans or cis (if you’re tempted to answer ‘it’s complicated’, round off to trans)?
Choose:
My tag ramble was so long that Tumblr cut it off (apparently the current limit is 30 tags), so I’m dumping it into the main post body:
#I’ve been wavering on whether to reblog this for ages
#I felt kind of bad about piling on to Sofi’s notespam like that
#but it being context for the next post has pushed me over into “yes”
#I didn’t realise until after voting that the character creation is one-time-only rather than ongoing access
#which makes the correct answer less *obvious*
#but I stand by my vote of cis | character creation
#(as it happens I *am* considering doing a second puberty through this‚ but they’d both be estrogenic)
#(honestly I’d barely even need the magic ID updating)
#(29-year-old me in 12-year-old me’s body could pass for 29 about as well as I could in 29-year-old body)
#(the two mes look pretty much the same: it’s all a matter of how you act)
#((well‚ 12-year-old me was a little smaller‚ but within the adult range and her face was already more or less stable))
#(((ooh‚ I bet I could tweak it so that I *stay* five-foot-one this time around)))
#(((during my first puberty my body map never updated for my final growth spurt‚ and
#I’m not *dysphoric* about being two inches too tall‚ but it does get a bit disorienting sometimes)))
#anyway my point there is that…a lot of people in the notes are going “money can be exchanged for goods and services”
#but I think in this case that’s actually backwards
#while money and health do both feed into each other
#health can be exchanged for money to a much greater degree than money can be exchanged for health
#money can *maybe* buy you the *appearance* of 9 – 17
#–(depending on how much puberty I can get away with doing again without fucking up my brain)–
#more years of youth‚ but it won’t buy you the lifespan nor the functionality of it
#money can buy you the ability to *breathe* your homeworld’s atmosphere even during pollen season
#and enough of it can buy you the ability to *talk* while breathing it
#but it can’t really buy you the ability to eat and drink while breathing it‚ and that’s a significant handicap in itself
#(not to mention the street harassment you get wearing a prosthetic immune system (to keep your built-in immune system from freaking out))
#likewise‚ money can buy disease *prevention*‚ but not the ability to shrug it off once you’ve caught it
#the ability of money to buy more robust bones is extremely limited
#(have I ever broken a bone? no! but why settle for merely *adequate* bone strength when I can have *optimal* bone strength?)
#((…god‚ why is anyone who is not *actively dying* for want of resources taking the money over the health))
#((I was so very aware‚ that time last year that a ventilation floor grate broke beneath me‚ that if I’d been 80 I would have *died*))
#((but I was 28‚ and I got away without even a broken bone))
#((why would you give that up any more than you have to))
#the list goes on
#meanwhile‚ health can buy you a nice steady low-non-physical-barrier-to-entry job as a farmhand or dockworker
#(not *as* steady as magic income‚ yes‚ and I *do* care a great deal about that‚ but I care about health *more*)
#and I’m not altruistic enough to take more money than I need so that I can give the rest away‚ not given what else is on offer
Tags:
#reply via reblog #tag rambles #surveys #transhumanism #gender #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #adventures in human capitalism #aging cw #death tw #poison cw? #injury cw #illness tw?
kinda weird how everyone is so certain about what chalk tastes like
think they’re wrong. it tastes initially multivitamin-tablet bland, sure, but then quickly starts to get bitter and slightly tangy, with a polymeric note before I spat it out
not as expected
What chalk did you try? I wonder if hagoromo tastes better than competitors.
it was Hagoromo. fortunately, my department provides free Crayola chalk for people with low standards and the category of things I’ll put in my mouth for the bit is large. the Crayola chalk is mainly just bland, like multivitamins but moreso, with a slight bitterness that develops after a while, but none of the tang or plasticky taste of Hagoromo. it’s a much less intense experience. further, Crayola doesn’t have that same melt-in-the-mouth texture that mathematicians the world over crave
#1 – 2. I don’t know‚ why can’t you #3 – 5. fast-food restaurants (and also grocery stores) #no you don’t have to pay‚ and it weirds us out when you ask our permission to use the restroom #you *do* have to ask for water because we’re supposed to check that you’re filling your cup with water and not soda #although the probability of getting an employee who doesn’t give a shit about that is fairly high #(many people buy bottled water from us and I look down on them) #(there is a water fountain (with cups!) Right There) #really almost any non-tiny store and some of the tiny ones will have public bathrooms #6. masks are a solution to many of life’s problems #(let’s face it‚ it’s ragweed season‚ the air wasn’t going to be breathable anyway) #(also I do hear vehicle electrification is gaining a good foothold) #(including the buses) #7. I don’t live in cities because they exist in a state of constant sensory overload #good luck re-designing that #no‚ really‚ I wish you luck #(in the cities I’ve visited‚ though‚ the things I listed above were still true) #(is this‚ like‚ an America thing?) #(no that can’t be right‚ the American cities I’ve visited weren’t like this and also this guy’s username is albertvancouver) #(what the hell is going on out in Vancouver) #(maybe move to Kitchener‚ you poor thing) #(you already have right-of-abode there) #(life doesn’t have to be like this) #tag rambles #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #our home and cherished land #autism #venting cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #scrupulosity cw? #illness tw?
@ms-demeanor personally i’m on board for this whole “fundamental aspects of physics are toxins” thing. i for one think we need to purge our bodies of the weak interaction, because of its unnatural asymmetry. that can’t be good for us. probably caused by gluten or something.
!!! RIGHT-HANDED PARTICLES DO NOT INTERACT !!!
***neutrinos do not interact***
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #physics #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #poison cw?
If this video helps even one person, it was worth it.
So, I’ve got a ton of ingredients that my body reacts to: corn, citric acid, gluten, chocolate, bananas, peanut oil–I’m all over the place.
It was so hard to read ingredient labels and just find food that I could eat. Grocery trips were unbearable, they took like two or three hours usually.
But I always had this idea on how to make it easier. So I quit my job and helped build an app over the past few years. And that app’s called Fig.
[A phone screen showing the app interface, which Tyler scrolls through. Top text reads: “First up: Do you follow any of these diets? Dietary restrictions are complex – it’s ok to select more than one!” Underneath is a checklist of ingredients and dietary restriction, including categories with suboptions.]
What makes fig unique is we’re trying to help pretty much everybody that has to avoid certain ingredients.
That means we’ve got a ton of things that you can select from–even really specific ingredients.
[Camera briefly returns to Tyler’s face again.]
And like I had dreamed of for so many years, checking ingredients is as quick as this.
[A phone camera scans the barcode on a bottle of spices. Details about the product appear, including an ingredients list and allergen statement. The ingredient “citric acid” appears in red all-caps. There is also an accompanying message that says “This product does not match your Fig.”]
And finding food you can eat is as simple as this.
[The app displays a scrollable list of food items, similar to a storefront. Each item has a save toggle and is accompanied by a photo, the product brand/name, and its size. There is a search bar labeled “search for a product.” There are also menus for narrowing the search; one is set to “allowed,” one is set to “Whole Foods,” and another unaltered menu is titled “Category.”]
[The camera returns to Tyler.]
So if you know anybody with food allergies, stomach issues, other dietary restrictions, I’d really appreciate it if you shared it with them.
[The appstore listing for Fig: Food Scanner & Discovery.]
It’s called Fig, it’s completely free, and you can get it on iOS and Android in the US.
Currently only available in the US, but their website says they’re “excited to expand to Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom soon”.
Tags:
#interesting #food #poison cw? #it looks like their business model is the standard intrusive advertising shit #so tread with caution #but it exists if you need it
@rustingbridges replied: “how expired are expired filters anyway. what causes them to go bad”
I’m not sure.
[…]
Some googling *suggests* that shelf lives for particulate filters are mostly a legal fiction, with a side of “the longer it sits around, the more opportunities for it to get physically damaged without you noticing”. Gas filters have a finite capacity to absorb gas which is eventually used up even just with normal traces of stuff in the air (I’ve noticed that the added nuisance-vapour filtration in my P100s stops working after 3 – 4 months of use), which vastly broadens the scope of possible “physical damage you didn’t notice” (a pinhole in the formerly-airtight packaging might do it). (Also gas filters fail open, so using a gas filter you falsely believed to have capacity left in it could severely fuck you over depending on how toxic the gas is.)
I wouldn’t want to bet my health on it, especially since 20 USD for [a primary set + a spare set] every few years is pretty cheap. But I think I’d take a ten-year-old P100 over a cloth mask, if those were my options.
—
For disposables, the main problem seems to be the nosepiece and edging, which break down and deform over time and make it harder to seal the respirator properly.
—
(For the record, I’ve been replacing my filters every four months or so when I can smell the ethylene or whatever the fuck it is stinking up the walk-in refrigerator at work (I assume nobody else has noticed it because for them it’s being drowned out by the particulate scents), but keeping all of the old filters in their original boxes (which have opening dates Sharpied on them) on a shelf in my bedroom. *Germs* don’t clog filters, but *smoke* does: if–and I would not be remotely surprised if this happens, with the way the world’s been going [link]–I find myself dealing with smoky air on a scale of months with a rickety-at-best supply chain, I may be glad to have those filters on hand.))
The only episode I’ve seen involved a woman slowly poisoning her boyfriend who had gold allergy with gold that she snuck into the hospital in her vagina.
House caught her by rubbing his hands with special sauce that changes color in reaction to gold and grabbing her hands outside the stall before she could wash her hands, it was insane.
Me: I watched House straight through and don’t remember that. Surely dasha-aibo dreamed it *googles* not only does this episode exist, I remember other things from it. But the vaginal gold smuggling was just not that memorable.
House is crazy enough that I might just do a rewatch to document the crazy shit he does per season
Tags:
#House #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #unsanitary cw? #poison cw?
Usual recommendation for leaded solder is well-ventilated work area, eye protection and gloves, an extraction system is a nice to have, but my bedroom’s ventilation is somewhat lacking so a filtered facemask is an alternative solution. This has P100 cartridges which are pretty common for soldering/welding applications.
Eye protection for soldering is the kind of thing that is not so much about protecting you from chronic issues in the long run, but rather defending you from the 1 in 1000 chance that the flux core of your solder bubbles over and splats you in the eye with a drop of molten lead and flux, so it’s really the highest priority PPE you should get if you only do soldering infrequently.
Rosin inhalation probably won’t fuck you up that bad three or four times a year, but there’s not much to do about an acute case of eyelead.
Tags:
#even *more* uses for P100s! #*makes notes* #(not that I have any intention of soldering anything) #the more you know #injury cw #poison cw?
they’re one of the fruits where the supermarket variety is the supermarket variety because it survives the trip, not because they’re good
meanwhile tomato plants are really low effort. if you have favorable conditions you can do literally nothing
—
Where are you *finding* conditions that aren’t full of weeds and wildlife-competing-with-you-for-the-food and the occasional blight? A greenhouse?
(…actually, that might not be a bad idea. I *have* heard of people building little personal greenhouses in their backyards, and nothing keeps squirrels from taking one bite out of your mom’s tomato and walking away like a fucking *door*, right?)
Re: surviving the trip, home-grown zucchinis taste about the same but we’ve noticed the shelf life is *vastly* longer. Store-bought zucchinis start to shrivel up and go soft within a few days of bringing them home; home-grown zucchinis can sit in the fridge for several *weeks*. Makes it a lot easier to plan your meals.
Honestly, probably a good part of my problem with gardening is that, because *Mom* loves home-grown tomatoes for some fucking reason, they end up the focal point of the garden and a great deal of my gardening-related labour is thoroughly alienated: I never see the fruits *or* the vegetables of my labour.
A garden optimised for what *I* thought was most worth growing would have zero tomatoes and more garlic and zucchini, with perhaps just enough potatoes to keep in practice so that I can put potatoes in the victory garden. And probably more perennials like mulberries. And possibly mushrooms. And I would want to do a bunch of research and expert-consultation regarding which weeds are secretly edible, since anything *that* easy to grow sounds like something I should take advantage of.
(I’ve been meaning to do some more digging into how to eat dandelions. I’ve heard you can put the new greens in salads and the petals in pancake batter, but I don’t normally eat salads *or* pancakes. Can you just, like, munch on a raw dandelion flower straight-up? Can I fulfil my childhood dream of eating a pretty flower I found in the backyard?)
Yeah, you can just munch any part of dandelion – I often do that when I’m reading in the garden. Older leaves get bitter and shouldn’t be eaten in big amounts, and roots need cooking. Flower is just fine though.
—
Hell yeah!
—
This is another area where I like a lot of the things the communing-with-nature people are putting out but for completely different reasons. I want to know more about the natural world around me *so that I can exploit it better*. Which wildflowers can I eat? What’s the name of that one plant where when you run through a field of them it sounds like popcorn popping? Can I eat those too?!
(I never stopped wanting to stick interesting plants in my mouth: I just learned to resist it, to assume everything was poisonous until proven otherwise. And for the most part, nobody ever taught me which interesting plants I didn’t have to resist.)
I never stopped wanting to stick interesting plants in my mouth: I just learned to resist it
i never learned this and im still alive. i like to think it’s made me stronger
as for tomatos I don’t think you have to do that much? if your soil and weather conditions are good you can just put the seeds in the ground and come back later to find that you have a giant cherry tomato bush which is overrunning the rest of your garden and that produces way to many tomatos for any ten people to eat
if you don’t have this you might need to water them? I remember watering tomatos. most of the weeds around here don’t get tall enough to fuck with tomatos much. if it’s a major issue you can put them in pots I guess. we never had trouble with squirrels, altho we did have to stop growing tomatos in the backyard because one of the dogs ate them all. I don’t grow many tomatos because I don’t like tomatos, but fresh ones really are better.
idk about potatos specifically but I think durable transportable stuff like potatos and onions is the relative advantage of actual farmers. relative to growing fragile vegetables that kind of thing is probably only worth doing to the extent you’re having fun with it
My mom has tried to grow tomatoes pretty much every year for the past 10+ years and we have had very few home-grown tomatoes to eat
It might be where we live– people not from here think you can grow anything in Georgia but the summer heat really is too much for a lot of plants to handle. The state was also plagued by droughts for a lot of my childhood.
We also had a lot of Critters come sample the garden. Deer, squirrels, rabbits, tomato hornworms, etc etc etc. It always made my mom SO dismayed to come outside one morning to find that a deer had chomped off the entire top half of her biggest tomato plant, but you’d think she would have learned to expect it after about the fourth time
We DID sometimes get to eat the tomatoes if we picked them while still green and then used them for fried green tomatoes. Fried green tomatoes are really delicious. It’s just not what we had wanted to have when we planted tomatoes!
I’ll admit I don’t know anything about Georgia. I think it’s where depressing movies about plantations take place. it produces SCAD students. there’s a big airport I’ve never connected thru.
I asked my mother about tomatos and her opinion is that they’re easy to grow but you have to water them very regularly or else they’ll be sad and also blighted. this is maybe extra true if it’s very hot and sunny, which I’ve been told is the case in georgia. conversely farther north you may have trouble getting enough sun? that could make tomatos slower, maybe
idk about deer. the three places I’ve grown tomatos were:
suburb, but not near the forest so no deer. plenty of squirrels and rabbits but they were never a problem
fire escape. only cats and pigeons, neither of which are much trouble for tomatos
middle of nowhere. shitloads of deer but in the summer they just eat stuff in the forest. huge problem for slow growing perennials but not so much for tomatos
The previous post [link] reminded me to post an update on this:
>>What’s the name of that one plant where when you run through a field of them it sounds like popcorn popping? Can I eat those too?!
I took a picture of a popcorn flower and searched by similar images, and it’s a Plantago lanceolata (sometimes called a ribwort plantain). And apparently you *can* kind of eat them [link], though it’s more of a medicinal thing than a food thing.
Tags:
#oh look an update #food #gardening #reply via reblog #flowers #the more you know #poison cw? #proud citizen of the Future
Brinens and Things 