reply via reblog

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

rustingbridges:

mfw I realize my socks cost as much as my shoes

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Yeah, for a couple weeks recently I was wearing CAD$35 thrift-store hiking boots (to be fair they were probably over $100 new) with CAD$50 merino socks.

My conclusion:

The socks *are* great. They’re remarkably comfortable especially compared to my lower-end wool socks, they’re well-built. They’re better than Walmart socks.

…but they’re not *fifty times* better than Walmart socks. And they cost fifty times as much.

I will be reserving them for hiking.

Tags:

#although it looks like if you buy 3+ pairs at a time they’re only thirty times as much #but still #reply via reblog #clothing #recs #(sort of) #adventures in human capitalism

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sigmaleph:

you guys are reading emails?

I am seeing polls like this one and like. the number of unread emails in my inbox is definitely in the hundreds and getting a more precise upper bound requires trusting gmail not to lie to me because it only loads emails in sets of fifty at a time. I do not, in fact, trust gmail not to lie to me about this, because they often do. doesn’t matter. anyway.

like. 99% of the email i get is

  1. we’re updating our terms of service!
  2. thing you were following updated!
  3. confirmation email from an online purchase!
  4. social media notification!
  5. spam from companies i can’t block because they don’t distinguish their spam emails from their actual useful emails!

and things like that. i don’t read those emails, in the sense of ‘click through so they are no longer marked unread’. i read the subject line, which tells me all i need to know. if it’s a notification on my phone sometimes i remember to quick-archive it because there’s a convenient button for it. then it accumulates as detritus on my inbox until it becomes relevant later on or i do an archiving sweep every few months.

Nothing in my main two email inboxes (one for Brin and one for legal-name stuff) is marked unread, though…*counts*…for my legal-name email around 15 are emails that I have not literally read (4 where the title alone tells me everything I need to know from it, the other 11 mostly newsletters or discussion of upcoming volunteer events), plus another 6 that I’ve read but have not finished acting upon. Brin has 3 inbox emails, all of them AO3 updates.

If an email is *marked* unread *and* in the inbox, that means it’s new enough that I haven’t even glanced at the title yet. Newsletters that I traditionally read over lunch (rather than whenever I get around to it) get moved to their own folders and *then* re-marked unread until I actually read them: I have 31 unread Canadian Accountant newsletters and 1 unread Money Stuff.

Most emails I move to one of several folders (options include, but are not limited to, “Other” and Trash) on a scale of hours after getting them. The ones that require more work to sort, like the ones that are in there right now, I do…well, *most* of them around once or twice a month (with the occasional smaller sweep in-between), but things that involve watching videos often take months or years.

I communicate with my parents over email pretty much every day.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

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jonaldronaldrolkientolkien:

goblinblogging:

bedenehapsedilenruhlar:

Sea Glass By IG: @seaglass_takechan

takipçi hilesi Pinterest: @artwoonz

Eat?

for to eat????????

@another-normal-anomaly, are you still taking reports of violations of the food/pretty-rock binary?

Tags:

#rocks #not to be confused with #food #it looks like that last picture has already been filed with Anomaly‚ but this is a more detailed report #pretty things #reply via reblog

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

sigmaleph:

brin-bellway:

kitstacean:

spaceshipoftheseus:

akaanonymouth:

What is it about fics then, where characters always, ALWAYS, have a spare toothbrush conveniently just hanging about in bathroom cupboards for that time someone is, usually unexpectedly, staying the night?

I have lived a few decades now, and I have never known anyone who keeps spare toothbrushes. Is it really common??

if you are the kind of just-in-case clutter goblin who does not throw things away, and you live in a country where it is standard practice for the dentist to give you a free toothbrush every time you go, then it is extremely possibly to have several years-old unused “spare” toothbrushes of extremely cheap but basically functional quality stashed away in your bathroom whether or not you visit the dentist at the recommended frequency

Don’t people buy multipacks of toothbrushes? I use an electric now, but back in the day I got the ones from my dentist and also bought the 8 pack of toothbrushes then I’d forget about my spare 5 toothbrushes in my cupboard when I see the multipack on sale again and then – you get the idea.

There are people who don’t keep spare toothbrushes??

What if you fumble your toothbrush and it falls onto the toilet plunger, do you then just *not have* a toothbrush?

What if you go to the store–for any toothbrush-replacement reason, fumbling or otherwise–and they’re out of toothbrushes because it’s the 2020s and a store is always out of an absolute minimum of three things on your shopping list at any given time?

*please* let me give you a toothbrush from out of my gallon bag of spare toothbrushes, I am *begging* you, you do not have to live on a knife’s edge

i don’t think i’ve ever unexpectedly lost a toothbrush

but also i think you seem to consider ‘you don’t have a toothbrush’ as… more of an emergency than I do?

if i lose my toothbrush and don’t happen to have spares and it’s too late to go buy a new one what would happen is i would not brush my teeth that night or the following morning, and i’d buy one the next day. and this seems basically fine to me. obviously an inferior outcome to the one where i do brush my teeth, but not a serious problem.

Maybe it seems like more of a hassle if one normally goes shopping fortnightly. Almost any loss of sole toothbrush would require making some sort of special arrangement, going out of my way to do something or convince someone else to do it.

And even if it’s not a *serious* problem, it’s satisfying to be able to simply make a problem Not.

Relatedly, I consider household-inventory buffers to be a good idea by default: with how cheap and small and indefinitely-shelf-stable and inevitably-useful-sooner-or-later toothbrushes are, I would basically need a good reason to *not* have some spare toothbrushes. It’s all just part of keeping a household running smoothly, from my perspective. I store them next to the 20-pack of bar soap I bought at Costco.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #domesticity #medical cw? #unsanitary cw?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

kitstacean:

spaceshipoftheseus:

akaanonymouth:

What is it about fics then, where characters always, ALWAYS, have a spare toothbrush conveniently just hanging about in bathroom cupboards for that time someone is, usually unexpectedly, staying the night?

I have lived a few decades now, and I have never known anyone who keeps spare toothbrushes. Is it really common??

if you are the kind of just-in-case clutter goblin who does not throw things away, and you live in a country where it is standard practice for the dentist to give you a free toothbrush every time you go, then it is extremely possibly to have several years-old unused “spare” toothbrushes of extremely cheap but basically functional quality stashed away in your bathroom whether or not you visit the dentist at the recommended frequency

Don’t people buy multipacks of toothbrushes? I use an electric now, but back in the day I got the ones from my dentist and also bought the 8 pack of toothbrushes then I’d forget about my spare 5 toothbrushes in my cupboard when I see the multipack on sale again and then – you get the idea.

There are people who don’t keep spare toothbrushes??

What if you fumble your toothbrush and it falls onto the toilet plunger, do you then just *not have* a toothbrush?

What if you go to the store–for any toothbrush-replacement reason, fumbling or otherwise–and they’re out of toothbrushes because it’s the 2020s and a store is always out of an absolute minimum of three things on your shopping list at any given time?

*please* let me give you a toothbrush from out of my gallon bag of spare toothbrushes, I am *begging* you, you do not have to live on a knife’s edge

Tags:

#reply via reblog #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #domesticity #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #medical cw? #unsanitary cw?

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

rustingbridges:

I am curious what normal people with hyphenated names do when they have kids. double hyphenate? remove the hyphen? pick one parental surname? hyphenate half of the hyphenated surname with the other?

I vaguely get the impression that the most common thing to do is “children inherit the non-hyphenated parent’s surname”, and have never in practice heard of two hyphenated people marrying each other.

My vote is for “maternal halves should be matrilineal and paternal halves should be patrilineal”.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #names

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

rustingbridges:

poipoipoi-2016:

animentality:

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Mom didn’t plan this, but my sister went to Cedar Point September 15, 2001.

Because the hotel was non refundable.

The lines for everything were so short my mother eventually started letting a 7-year-old ride alone because she couldn’t handle 6 rides an hour on Millenium Force.

but really, not going to cedar point would have been letting the terrorists win. riding millenium force twenty times in a row as an expression of the indomitable american spirit, etc

God, being at Disney World on 9/11 was such a pain.

They closed the parks. September 11th was supposed to be the monthly open-late night, and they didn’t hold a replacement open-late night (I think they did refund the tickets, but the late hours worked better with our sleep schedule and I was looking forward to that). We were on hold so long trying to find out if our plane back had been cancelled that I took a shift of keeping an ear on the phone because Dad was getting tired, and eventually we learned that it had been. All of the adults were very sad all the time and spent an entire day watching the same two clips over and over, as if it would help anything. My parents wouldn’t come out of their room that night: I had to make myself microwave popcorn for dinner.

(It wasn’t *as* much of a pain as it could have been. The hotel let us stay for free for a couple of extra days until we could make alternate travel arrangements. The rental-car company let us take their car and drop it off at their Philadelphia branch.)

The length of the lines was not what stuck out to me.

Tags:

#posts from seven-year-old me #9/11 #Disney #home of the brave #my childhood #reply via reblog #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

humanfist:

moral-autism:

Me telling housemates about radon risks: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!
Me being asked to split radon detector costs: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

#*adds a radon testing unit to the List at position 17*

now I want to know about the rest of this list

Current edition of the List of Things to Save Up For (colloquially “the List”), redacted-and-annotated-for-public-display version.

(While I *remembered* the drywall repair, I noticed while annotating that I had not actually written it down, so now the radon testing unit is at position #18.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #oh look an original post #adventures in human capitalism #domesticity #poison cw

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

rustingbridges:

I have no idea how dental insurance companies make any money, why would you ever sign up if you didn’t know they were going to pay out more than you put in?

I come across so many personal-finance bloggers who think dental/prescription insurance is just obviously a basic necessity, and then you look at the plan they’re on and the payout caps are so low that it’s damn near physically impossible to get out more than you put in no matter *how* bad your health luck is.

(Meanwhile they live in a jurisdiction where the government has high-deductible anti-catastrophe prescription insurance for everyone and they don’t know it.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #medical cw #adventures in human capitalism #(unfortunately there *isn’t* high-deductible anti-catastrophe government dental insurance) #(and my dad sure did have some dental catastrophes this year) #((but a dental plan with a $400 cap wouldn’t have helped a damn))

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

analytically:

moral-autism:

spotify wrapped is weird because of how many of you are apparently using subscription services for music

you know there are legally operating websites your ISP will be cool with you visiting that have tons of music files on there, right?

Spotify is free, though; i assume most Spotify Wrapped posters are just using the ad-supported free plan, not paying for a subscription. I do dislike the ads, though – which are the legal music piracy websites?

Youtube. For ad-free, Youtube + UBlock Origin.

(note for some of the mobile Internet users out there: UBlock Origin *is* available on Android Firefox)

The breadth of their library, already substantial a decade ago, has improved tremendously. It has been several years since the last time I searched for a song on Youtube and did not find it.

Tags:

#anyway I agree with OP #for songs I know I’ll want to listen to many times in the future I use local files #but if I only want a song once or twice‚ or if I’m looking up new songs‚ that is what Youtube is for #(this is actually my *primary* usecase for Youtube) #((well‚ that and videos to watch while on the treadmill)) #reply via reblog #the more you know #music #I think different aspects of this post qualify for both #proud citizen of The Future #and #disappointed permanent resident of The Future