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~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

hametronit:

ahh yes, the only thing this apocalypse was missing..

5b7dec9d31e108533e918f4bd8d8a2970d8879c5

The hellcracker

 

anaisnein:

excuse you these are pure comfort

 

tototavros:

i had them exactly once, loved them, then used them as school lunch for 6 months, got tired for a few, and then used them again for a year

 

rustingbridges:

hmm I wonder if there are regional patterns in how matzah is spelled. I didn’t know matzo was a valid spelling. possibly this is because I only interact with matza in verbal conversation. tbh none of those spellings feel right

 

businesstiramisu:

I think it’s Hebrew vs. Yiddish (same with Shabbat vs. Shabbos), but I haven’t actually checked that. Also: Matza is great – matza coffee, matza brie, the leftovers make great breakfast!

 

rustingbridges:

hmm I would expect to have been exposed to the yiddish version, since all the jews I knew were germanic and had jokes about older relatives making yiddish expressions, so I might have just not been paying attention closely enough to pick up the difference. alternately the kids I knew didn’t learn much yiddish outside of the oy vey tier, and did have to go to hebrew school.

The secret to good matzah is to tell the “egg matzah is ~only for invalids~” rabbis to go fuck themselves. Egg matzah is pretty good.

(And yeah, we use surprisingly little Yiddish (and correspondingly more Hebrew) in my family. I remember having a joke fly over my head as a pre-teen because I didn’t know what a yarmulke was: we always called them kippot. (singular kippah)

And all those times on Wikipedia where I was reading about genetic disorders and Ashkenazim were more prone to damn near everything, and I was just kind of like “huh, sucks to be them”, and then when I was about seventeen I found out *I* was Ashkenazic.

(Only half-Ashkenazic, though, so I guess that dilutes the inbreeding. And most of the really terrible ones are things I would have noticed by now.))

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#*knocks on wood* #reply via reblog #Judaism #Passover #food #language #illness mention

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

c11beb73eb8e6370460cb30ed0b31c96e43c7481

jadagul:

collapsedsquid:

Stockpiling intensifies

In fairness, the problem in Katrina wasn’t the storm surge overtopping the levees. Everyone knew to be terrified of that (at least those of us living in New Orleans). And the hurricane passed, and the city hadn’t flooded, and we all exhaled.

And then the levee collapsed.

I keep hearing rumbles about the threat of solar EMPs and how “we should prepare”, but what am I, Jane Q. Citizen, actually supposed to *do* about it? Or is this purely a “talk to your politicians and try to convince *them* to do something about it, because they’re the only ones who can” thing?

(Argumate seems to think this is funny, but I *do* in fact own a Wikipedia dump and I highly recommend it [link]. Not sure it would survive an EMP, though.)

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#apocalypse cw #covid19 #reply via reblog #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #discourse cw? #illness mention

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jadagul:

fatpinocchio:

When autocomplete is too slow and you google “s” instead of going to Slate Star Codex.

My browser is convinced I want to google “que” instead of going to “questionable content”. Nothing I can do seems to convince it otherwise.

Sometimes it’ll do the google thing even after the smartbar is displaying the site I want, and I still haven’t figured that one out.

Apologies if you’ve tried this already, but: last time I encountered someone with a similar problem, going into the browser history and deleting the offending search-results page (in this case, for “que”) fixed it.

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#reply via reblog

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

moonlit-tulip:

There’s this failure mode that my dreams occasionally fall into.

A dream starts out as an ordinary interesting dream wherein things are happening. At some point, something forces me half-awake; the two most common culprits are either having slept for long enough that I’m out of sleep debt, or getting overheated by a fever in the middle of the night, but it’s occasionally prompted by other things too. Instead of waking up the rest of the way, though, I keep on dreaming while half-awake, just with much less brainpower behind the dream’s creative processes.

At that point, a handful of major ideas and images from the dream up to that point get tossed together and looped: instead of things happening, I just get repeated scenes of those same few ideas and images, over and over with no interesting variation whatsoever. Eventually, subjectively after a pretty long time (but not necessarily really after so long, since that sort of half-awake state massively skews my perception of time), the experience becomes sufficiently unpleasantly boring that I muster the motivation to force myself more fully awake in order to avoid continuing to experience it, at which point it ends (as long as I don’t try to go back to sleep too soon afterwards, in which case it sometimes resumes).

Is this a thing that other people have any experience with? I don’t recall having ever heard someone else describe anything along these lines, but it’s an interesting (if somewhat unpleasant) brain-state that I’d be curious to learn about others’ experiences with if they do exist.

>>the two most common culprits are either having slept for long enough that I’m out of sleep debt, or getting overheated by a fever in the middle of the night<<

These two culprits have different results for me, neither of which are your result.

Half-awake and *not* feverish: pretty much like a normal dream except also aware of [the external-world senses that don’t require moving] (proprioception and sound definitely work, smell probably *would* work but I don’t think I’ve been in a position to try it). Lucid, because the above is an extremely obvious indicator of dreaming. *Not* sleep-paralysed, but if you move the dream ends. (This often leads to absent-mindedly adjusting position and then going “wait, no, dammit, I wanted to see what happens next”. On the bright side, if I *want* it to end I can easily arrange that.)

Half-awake and feverish: only sometimes lucid, since even an extremely obvious indicator of dreaming is not always enough when you’re delirious. Tossing and turning is not enough to end it, and even getting up to go to the bathroom will often just put it on hold. Has been known to cause voices instead of full worlds [link].

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#dreams #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #embarrassment squick? #reply via reblog

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i-run-a-trash-blog:

New proposal for a doctor who spin off show: Donna is now immortal and has her memories because uhh I said so. Jack runs into her. Niether of them have a way to contact the doctor, both of them have a knack for hijinks, the show is just the two of them fuckin around and having adventures. Send post.

While you could just leave it unstated why Donna is immortal and intact, may I present to you all a canon-compliant excuse:

You know how Dalek Caan referred to what happened to Donna as “dying”? You know how the Doctor told her family that “that version of Donna is dead”?

You know who *else* considered it a death?

That’s right, the Testimony Foundation.

After that, well, timeship + hijinks…

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#I wanted to see the universe so I stole a glass avatar and ran away #Doctor Who #fanfic #story ideas I will never write #reply via reblog #death tw #amnesia cw

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etirabys:

I do seem to have a lot of dreams where the dream is a book as well as a sequence of lived events, and I’m reading it at the same time or faster than I’m experiencing it. Do other people have this as a recurring dream feature?

Yes. Not just books: I once started a post with “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)”

Occasionally I’ll still get the textual layer as well, but often it just goes full immersion with “book” as an abstract framing device.

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#dreams #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #reply via reblog

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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dagny-hashtaggart:

Finally starting to see a real run on the grocery stores in Portland, at least if my local branches are an indication.

The bread aisle was almost completely cleaned out, but apparently people don’t much like whole wheat English muffins or burger buns, which is convenient because I do like whole wheat English muffins and burger buns.

 

rustingbridges:

Burger buns make sense as a leftover but I don’t understand English muffins. Compared to most bread items they keep well.

I mean, really, a run on premade bread is inherently farcical – it’s a terrible food item to stockpile, it doesn’t keep and by volume you’re mostly storing air.

But if I was going to, I’d hit the bagels first.

 

brin-bellway:

Bread keeps very well if you put it in the freezer. Just scrape off any significant collections of ice crystals before thawing, else it’ll get soggy.

The volume thing is a fair point, though: we do stockpile bread under normal circumstances, but one should probably cut it from the list if storage space is even *thinking* about becoming an issue.

 

rustingbridges:

this is true, but freezer space is typically the most premium space if you’re trying to build up a reserve, since most people have only a small freezer in their fridge (sidenote: if you want preservation over convenience, turning your fridge all the way to cold may convert part of it into a shitty freezer and will improve longevity in most of the rest of it).

anyway I was at the store and thinking about the toilet paper hypothesis – that it’s bulky and low margin, so stores stock as little as possible to not run out under normal conditions – and this totally applies to bread too. it’s cheap, it’s mostly air, and it expires faster than most stuff. so the tp hypothesis would explain why bread goes quickly too.

I was just thinking earlier today about how grateful I am for the eight people who are not here.

Once upon a time, long before I lived here, this house had a dozen inhabitants. They had *much* lower standards for the amount of indoor living space one person should have–by my own culture’s standards this house is not *ridiculously* roomy, though it could comfortably fit perhaps one or two more people–but nevertheless we have quite a bit of storage space, especially in a pinch.

For people with enough storage space and perhaps stability of housing (both of which, I am aware, are in all-too-short supply for many demographics), I continue to recommend supplementary freezers [link]. Very handy for stockpiling of all kinds. Do try to put them in areas where you can keep an eye on them, though: you don’t want it to go unnoticed if they break or get left open [link]. (I admit that our own freezer placement is not great, and we have occasionally lost food to this. Painful, but I expect it’s still worth it overall. Might also take it upon myself to do routine checks.)

(We also have a secondary mini-fridge, but we currently don’t keep it plugged in. Might come in handy for an intra-household quarantine, though!)

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#my parents may have run out of money but they still have a generation’s worth of accumulated physical capital #which I am very glad to have access to #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #food #covid19 #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

rustingbridges:

dagny-hashtaggart:

Finally starting to see a real run on the grocery stores in Portland, at least if my local branches are an indication.

The bread aisle was almost completely cleaned out, but apparently people don’t much like whole wheat English muffins or burger buns, which is convenient because I do like whole wheat English muffins and burger buns.

Burger buns make sense as a leftover but I don’t understand English muffins. Compared to most bread items they keep well.

I mean, really, a run on premade bread is inherently farcical – it’s a terrible food item to stockpile, it doesn’t keep and by volume you’re mostly storing air.

But if I was going to, I’d hit the bagels first.

Bread keeps very well if you put it in the freezer. Just scrape off any significant collections of ice crystals before thawing, else it’ll get soggy.

The volume thing is a fair point, though: we do stockpile bread under normal circumstances, but one should probably cut it from the list if storage space is even *thinking* about becoming an issue.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #food #covid19 #adventures in human capitalism #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

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judiciousimprecation:

Saw a lady on the bus wearing one of those fancy one-way valved n95 masks, and I tried to figure out why I felt so much irritation with this random stranger.

Obviously the majority of this was just that I was envious she either got ahold of masks before they went out of stock everywhere, or paid a ridiculous price for them, but also I realized, those valved n95 masks are like the exact opposite of regular surgical masks, courtesy-wise.

The surgical masks mostly just block the wearers sneezes and coughs and reduce the amount of infection they might spread, while not doing much to prevent inhaling germs. They are a device which protects bystanders much more than the wearer.

The n95 masks meanwhile, theoretically block all germs from getting into the wearer (modulo proper use), but the one-way valve means unfiltered breath from the wearer makes it back into the atmosphere, thereby blocking way less of the germs they might be exhaling. Thus the valved n95 masks do absolutely fuck-all for bystanders. Fuck you, I got mine

 

etiragram:

Your attitude surprises me. This person is not doing something wrong. Consider the universe where they covered exactly the same route, but without the mask. In that universe, they risked everyone else they came into contact with as much as they did in this one, but also incurred additional risk themself. And in this world, if the mask made a difference, they have reduced the probability of hurting other people by becoming an extra node in the transmitting network.

Feeling irritation with this person for protecting themself without addition protection to others is in some ways akin to feeling irritation for wearing a seat belt. And there’s an aspect to it that’s pretty similar to “How dare this person do the same thing many other people do, but incur fewer costs for it”.

In my opinion, the only thing they could be said to have done wrong is in buying up a scarce resource that some people say medical professionals need far more, but only if they believed they were making more people worse off somewhere and still chose to buy it.

 

judiciousimprecation:

Te be clear, I fully acknowledge that my attitude toward this person was irrational, and I think part of the reason the experience stuck with me was because I was confused about why I was feeling that way. I tried to touch on that in the second paragraph but I definitely could have been more clear that I don’t really endorse it.

I think, having grown up in a country where wearing masks is not a normal thing to do even when (avoiding being) sick, seeing someone wearing a surgical mask tickles the (entirely unendorsed!) “this person is wrong for doing a weird thing, shun them” and normally I compensate for that by reminding myself “no, it’s cool, they’re probably doing it as a courtesy to others, cut them some slack”. Without that loophole it’s much harder to shut that part of my brain up.

I still think there’s something interesting to the “keep everyone else from getting sick” vs “keep only myself from getting sick” dichotomy (oh no, is this prisoner’s dilemma?), and I’d be incredibly curious to see what a statistical toy model looks like where half the population gets ingress-only masks or egress-only masks, but in retrospect I definitely leaned too hard on the “people wearing valved respirators are jerks who care about no one but themselves” angle

Back before COVID-19, I bought a valved mask in significant part because I figured signalling “this mask is for my protection, not yours” would make me look like *less* of a jerk.

(‘I’m not going out in public while sick, I promise! I’m just highly sensitive to pollen! I’m not dangerous, please don’t be scared!’)

Turns out the valve was a weak point and the mask failed almost immediately. Mom wants to try tinkering with it and seeing if she can repair it, but I’m probably back to surgical masks for the foreseeable future. I was already worried that I was going to scare people who saw me take off a surgical mask on my way into the restaurant and then go and serve them food, and that’s probably even *more* of a concern in the midst of a plague.

—

>>I still think there’s something interesting to the “keep everyone else from getting sick” vs “keep only myself from getting sick” dichotomy (oh no, is this prisoner’s dilemma?)<<

The impression I got reading your OP is that the reason it was bothering you is that it *wasn’t* prisoner’s dilemma, that she *could* have protected herself *and* others (with a non-valved N95) but instead chose to protect only herself, sacrificing others’ *safety* for her *comfort* (slightly less restricted breathing, less foggy glasses if applicable).

(this is speaking about the hypothetical world where your intuition was justified; in the endorsed world she may very well have had access to valved N95s but not non-valved)

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etirabys:

Damn. Thinking “Every time I go grocery shopping while hungry, I just shamble around like a zombie grabbing random things of the shelves, but this time I’m aware that it’s a pitfall and I will hold it in my mind to avoid it” totally does not work. brain has a very strong belief that all food is a good idea. to my vexation, in between composing this post I bought girl scout cookies for the first time outside the Safeway while thinking, “I don’t need these, I don’t need to buy these, guhhhhh”.

While I don’t have this trait myself, for unrelated reasons I keep two granola bars in my bag at all times. Would you find that helpful?

(Very possibly you wouldn’t: I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve met with food-related problems that were *so* obviously solvable with granola bars that there *must* have been some reason they weren’t already doing that. But I think you yourself have talked about that being a stupid reason to [completely avoid bringing up a potential solution to something].)

Tags:

#is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #reply via reblog #food #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what