reply via reblog

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

justice-turtle:

My aunt will never realize that “having the spoons to traipse all over town looking for deals” is a luxury in itself. But she’s paying for things I do genuinely need, and I happen to actually have the spoons at the moment, so I will do the traipsing.

(I think she thinks I have squandered all my money. I will let her think this, so as actually to save some money. ETHICS. ;P)

I think there’s also the aspect where deal-hunting takes more spoons from some people than from others. A lot of the time I can get my brain to treat deal-hunting as a game, which makes things somewhat easier.

(I get something like the opposite of this sometimes, where Mom is really impressed by some cost-benefit analysis I’ve done and how hard that must have been, and meanwhile my brain did not see it as a fundamentally different thing from, like, the spreadsheet I made last month that calculates the most profitable thing to do with Baldwin’s cauldron.)

(I’m the sort of person who responds to “Let’s traipse all over town looking for deals!” with “Hang on, first let me calculate some fuel costs so we can see how much traipsing is worth it for how much saving”.)

—

P.S. I don’t know if this helps with the particular deals you’re hunting, but here is an app that shows you the local sales flyers for a (U.S. or Canada) postal code of your choice, and has a search function so you can do things like “show me all sales on potatoes”.

Tags:

#…there’s no way I’m not changing my major is there #how did I ever think I wasn’t gonna end up as an accountant #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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serinemolecule:

brin-bellway:

Also, I have acquired a new appreciation for AO3’s download function, which is great at facilitating archiving.

And I have acquired a new opposite-of-appreciation for fanfiction.net, which goes so far the other direction that you are *not allowed to copy text from a fic*. I did a couple of small fics by *going into the page source*, finding the fic *there*, pasting it into a LibreOffice document, and *manually replacing the br tags with line breaks* (there was probably some way to automate that last bit). Then I hit upon the solution of simply saving the entire page as an HTML file, which seems to have worked. Good: I was not looking forward to manually inserting line breaks in Chanson de Geste.

https://alanhogan.com/code/text-selection-bookmarklet

is what I personally use to copy/paste things from sites that don’t want me to. It doesn’t work on all sites, but it works on a lot of them.

Ooh, this looks promising. Thank you!

Tags:

#reply via reblog #the more you know #oh look an update #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

sinesalvatorem:

Question for the mind control fetishist community that is inexplicably over-represented among my followers:

I’ve recently become curious about the theory I’ve heard that asexual people who have kinks often have an autophilic sexuality. That is, their primary sexual interest is tied to them achieving some specific state. They’d have the same range of sexual response as allosexuals, but in response to achieving their preferred state to varyingly precise degrees.

For example, some asexuals are into amputation, or depictions of amputees. They often are more interested in being amputees themselves than in other people who are amputees. Often they’ll enjoy fantasising about being amputees, and further prefer situations where they can pretend to be amputees, and sometimes even desire actual amputation.

And I just remembered that lots of people who follow this blog are part of the mind control kink community! Which always surprises me, because I don’t think I post any mind control related content, and am honestly really sexually boring. But, like, I’ll totally give you guys more shout outs if you can help me learn about this.

My question is: Are asexual mind control fetishists more interested in being mentally controlled/impaired or in controlling others / the mental impairments of other? The autosexuality theory implies that asexuals should overwhelmingly prefer to be controlled/impaired, or be most aroused by the thought of their own altered mental state.

Also, autosexualities are in general correlated with being transgender. Are asexuals in the mind control kink community more likely to be transgender or feel gender dysphoric?

Right now I’m just curious about whether there’s any anecdotal support for this random thought, in case it’s worth doing a survey of. Would anyone be willing to tell me if their personal impression of the community supports or debunks this hypothesis? @acemindbreaker, @brin-bellway, @bannableoffense, @enscenic and anyone else who might have an opinion on this.

First of all, I would like to give the context in which I became aware of this post:

Me: *switches on Wi-Fi on phone, goes to check weather report*

Phone: *buzzes*

Me: Oh, is that an email notification?

Email notification: “sinesalvatorem has mentioned you in a post!

‘Question for the mind control fetishist community that is inexplicably over-represented among my followers…’”

I was amused by this. (I think because I played a critical part in the original surge in such followers.) (Also, it seems to be a popular kink among rat-Tumblr denizens in general.)

—

I personally am very much autophilic, but when I query my brain for “asexual or asexual-ish hypno-fetishists” I mostly get back switches. I’m not sure in how many cases their switchinesses were deliberately cultivated, though, or what they started off as if so. (I remember @ellaenchanting talking about how her first hypnosis community was aimed at non-sexual recreational users, and that in that community taking a single role was Not Done: everyone was expected to switch. (I think the idea was something like “how are you supposed to experience the full extent of how neat hypnosis is without seeing it from both sides? and anyway, experience with one side of things will help you when doing the other, because you know more about what it’s like for your partner”, plus an assumption that people weren’t going to be especially attached to one role to start with.))

I’m really not sure how gender tends to go.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text? #asexuality #gender

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~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

theopjones:

silver-and-ivory:

On the subject of vaguely paranoid precautions, I would like to be able to contact certain people I know over Tumblr right now even if something happens to Tumblr.

I think this would probably be best achieved individually by simply asking these people for contact information.

I don’t know how it would be accomplished on a larger scale.

Yah. I’m also worried about this. And also the related issue of losing the content I’ve posted here if something happens to this blog. 

Re: losing content, I use this backup-creation program. I’ve scheduled it to run automatically every evening, and once a week I (manually) make a zip copy of the folder to put on my phone as well. (I tried copying the folder without zipping it, but turns out copying tens of thousands of individual files takes an infeasible amount of time.)

You can also use it on blogs other than your own, since it only uses publicly available stuff.

(In addition to that backup, I keep Tumblr messaging logs in a collection of LibreOffice documents–one document per person–and my inbox and outbox are each in documents as well.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

Anonymous asked: guess that could be what’s behind paying someone by giving them a prepaid gift card, too–the gift card is as good as cash (assuming it’s to a place they want to spend money at) but you can buy it with a credit card

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

another-normal-anomaly:

argumate:

please don’t ever say gift cards are as good as cash, for gift cards must be cleansed from this earth by fire and the sword

Yes. With the exception of Amazon gift cards, which are as good as cash.

Nah. After a lot of analysis† and searching†, I *eventually* managed to figure out a way to make Amazon gift cards *90%* as valuable as cash, if you ignore the extra effort involved in buying electronics off of Amazon and reselling them for 90% value.

(Now, if Amazon started carrying Wegmans gift cards, I might consider Amazon credit as good as cash††. But not before.)

—

†Am I the only one for whom Tumblr links are often no longer distinguished from non-link text? I think it only happens on Chrome, but my choice are Chrome and Firefox, and Firefox Quantum is unusably slow.

††At least until we started making more than $2,000 or so in Amazon credit per year, which we might actually manage if we re-optimised our menial-Internet-labour payouts under an assumption that Amazon credit was as good as cash.

Tags:

#I essentially had to pay a fifty-fucking-dollar exchange fee to Amazon #but I *did* manage to wring $450 out of the $500 in menial-Internet-labour credits #planning to do it again next time we get enough credit built up #adventures in human capitalism #reply via reblog

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

another-normal-anomaly:

Hey uh remember when a fuckin Death Eater went under cover as an Order member and taught Harry to resist the Imperius Curse, which skill he then used against Voldemort within the year? Because that happened

note that said Death Eater had recently been kept under Imperius for like *eleven fucking years*

(although it doesn’t seem to be a “nobody else should ever have to go through what I went through” thing, since he Imperiuses some people himself (and not just for teaching purposes))

Tags:

#Barty Crouch Jr had a fucked-up life #Harry Potter #reply via reblog

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

justice-turtle:

ok so i’m pretty sure i know at least one or possibly two people in toronto

so one of the players from my d&d group has a question for y’all

she says “me and my gaggle of rich white friends are planning a road trip to canada, toronto is only like 8 hours from chi town so like not terrible, i was wondering what’s like fun stuff to do besides niagara falls and excessive drinking”

so uh, yeah. any suggestions? :-)

The CN Tower is neat if you’re okay with heights. (The elevator hurts your ears a bit, though. Try to swallow a lot or otherwise relieve the pressure.) There’s a transparent panel in one part of the floor. I’m not sure if my Girl Guide leader ever gave me the picture she took of me lying on that panel, with the ground far below as the backdrop, but that exists somewhere and you might like to do the same.

Casa Loma could be good, but I’m not sure what it’s like when they’re not hosting a big Girl Guide event.

There’s a biggish† amusement park in Vaughan (just outside Toronto) called Canada’s Wonderland. I’ve been there, like, once, over a decade ago, but I think it was decent?

—

I’m guessing from the Niagara Falls mention that it’s more of a “general Southwestern Ontario” thing than a “just Toronto” thing, so further out stuff:

Hmm. I mean, I went on a lot of field trips in my teens, but I feel like a lot of them are…like, they’re nice, but not in a *distinctive* way. (Also, some of them were *only* for school and school-like groups: the Woodlawn Memorial Park cemetery in Guelph would be pretty dull without their (great) school tour.) There are plenty of other museums in other places that are just as nice. Still, a general “always check out the local museums when touristing” policy will serve you pretty well here as it will elsewhere.

Some exceptions and possible exceptions to the general “check out museums”:

Last I heard the Ontario Science Centre (in Toronto) was kind of overpriced if you don’t already have a reciprocal membership with another museum††, but I think they’ve added more stuff since then and might be worthwhile now? And you might be rich enough not to care in any case.

The Canadian Medical Hall of Fame (in London) is basically just their website given physical form (a bunch of plaques and some screens with videos). If you’re interested in their stuff, just read the website (…if your computer can handle it): don’t bother showing up in person.

You note that most-to-all of the people in your group are white, so probably don’t go to any archaeology museums (the one I’m thinking of is the Museum of Ontario Archaeology in London) unless you’re the right kind of woke masochists (or are on the opposite end of the caring spectrum and aren’t bothered by Let’s Talk About These People Your People Oppressed at all; you do you, none of my business how many fucks you actually give about people as long you treat them okay). It’s too awkward otherwise to qualify as “fun stuff”.

(I kind of want to check out an archaeology museum in Europe someday. I bet they’re less awkward.)

—

I can’t give a whole lot in the way of restaurant recommendations, because my ability to take pleasure from food is somewhat limited. (Like, I *can* enjoy food, but I don’t really enjoy fancy food much *more* than plain food, and it never gets to the waxing-rhapsodic kinds of levels I’ve seen other people reach.)

—

The fact that you phrase it as “a road trip to Canada” implies you aren’t already in Canada, so maybe some more national-level stuff would be useful.

If you haven’t had Tim Tams before and are curious about them, they sell those at Zehrs (a grocery store chain of moderate fanciness/pricey-ness). Imported from Australia and everything.

If you haven’t had Mars bars before and are curious about them, they sell those pretty much anywhere with an impulse-buy rack. I don’t think they’re imported from Britain, but it probably doesn’t matter. They’re basically the same as Milky Ways in America, though. (to be confusing, Milky Way in Britain refers to what both America and Canada call “3 Musketeers”)

The best flavours of Tim Hortons bagel are Tomato Asiago (not as pizza-like as you would expect, but a different kind of good) and Garlic Parmesan, with Chive getting an honourable mention. Get them toasted and buttered for best results. They’re not available all the time in all branches, though, and tbh I don’t actually know if they carry them at all anymore; it’s been a while since I ate there. The fruit slushies are good too, and the muffins are decent. I don’t tend to buy anything else there (I don’t drink coffee).

(In general–and this might seem obvious to you already, I don’t know, but just in case–keep an eye out for interesting-looking food you wouldn’t be able to get in your normal location. I’ve lived here long enough that it’s kind of hard to dig through my memory for which things struck me as strange at first, though I could probably go “oh yeah, that was one of them” if somebody presented me with one.)

—

(JT, let me know how this goes if you can; I’m curious.)

—
†I went googling to confirm the name and Wikipedia calls it “the country’s largest”, so maybe I’m just spoiled by having seen Disney World.

††If you travel a lot and like museums at all (and haven’t already done this), maybe look into whether any of your local museums are part of a reciprocal-membership agreement and get a membership there. Back when I was an upper-middle-class South Jerseyan, my family had a membership at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, and it served us well throughout the East Coast. (Would probably have served us well out West, too, if we’d ever gone there.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #our home and cherished land #the more you know #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #long post #food

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

justice-turtle:

i’m not actually awake enough to go Deep with this so i’ll attempt to keep it brief

so the barnes and noble thing where they fired all their full time employees recently. obviously, terrible thing, sympathies, fuck capitalism, etc, but like.

for me specifically, that’s like “welp, another timeline shot”. cos if i had not quit my job there due to snow and crazybrains, one of me in the multiverse was still working there and probably full time or managerial at that point, so like… that one of me was fired along with the rest of them, and is probably now struggling to make rent or whatever.

and like. the thing i’m trying to say is. that’s capitalism. you can’t trust anybody, you can have a few good years or a lot of good years and then get fucked over just the same. you have to give your life to people you can’t trust.

and i’m so *bad* at not trusting. and that’s why i’m so bad at capitalism. actively not trusting takes a lot of spoons and fucks me the hell up. my default state is trust, and in a lot of timelines that’s killed me already, and it’s going to get me in a fair number of the rest.

and i hate that. i don’t know what to do with it, trying to be less trusting is… it’s different than trying to be less empathetic? it’s not “if i do that it will make me a Bad Person”. it’s that i *forget*. i don’t have a… a dimmer switch for trust. it’s all or nothing. and that just utterly does not work for capitalism and i *hate* it :-(

>>that one of me was fired along with the rest of them, and is probably now struggling to make rent or whatever.

[…]

you can’t trust anybody, you can have a few good years or a lot of good years and then get fucked over just the same<<

Hmm. I’m having a hard time verbalising my thoughts here…like, there’s generally only so much that somebody can fuck you over financially if you’ve had some good years to prepare in. But I guess the ability (or lack of) to go “I should use these good years to prepare for the inevitable fucking-over attempt” is in fact the problem (or a large part of it, anyway)?

(It seems like costs of living vary a *lot* from one set of circumstances to another, and figures that seem unrealistically high to one person can seem unrealistically low to another. But in the circumstances that *I’m* familiar with, a full-time minimum-wage job is enough money to support two pretty-careful people or 1.5 moderately-careful people. So if one *doesn’t* have dependents (but does have roommates for the bulk discounts), for every year one can hold on to a full-time job, one can live for 6 – 12 months after getting laid off. Longer, if one manages to obtain a job that pays more than minimum wage.)

(I guess it’s a variant of the idea of fuck-you money, one that focuses on the possibility of *them* telling *you* to fuck off rather than the other way around. “Fuck-me money”?)

—

I was just talking to Mom earlier today about how I’m not sure I’m ever going to be *able* to trust that an income won’t just disappear one day, that even in the better possible scenarios for a decade from now where I’ve gotten some cushy job in an accounting firm or something, I’ll probably still be living on the 2028-dollars equivalent of $1k – $1.5k/month and agonising over every expenditure and squirrelling away every spare cent for the winter.

Which is the opposite of the psychological issues you usually hear about poor people developing (and which you have yourself, right?), where they feel like there’s no point in saving because *savings* always disappear no matter what you do. I think this is because those people tend to have spent an extended and/or formative time as living-paycheck-to-paycheck!poor, whereas I spent mine as living-primarily-off-of-dwindling-savings!poor. Different kinds of poverty lead to different adaptations.

Tags:

#fun* fact: my parents ran out of money around the end of February (depending on how you count) #*not actually fun #it’s up to me and Brother to keep things running #(mostly Brother since he has more savings and more income) #((and the reason he has more savings is *because* he has more income)) #venting cw? #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

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GAME IDEA REBLOG THIS AND TRY TYPING YOUR URL EYES CLOSED

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

bd-doughnut-boi:

VD&diydgbyt-buh

 

toofartoobroken:

toofartoobrooen

 

eddietrashmouth:

Edidjetrashnouth

 

papermancrumbles:

Papermancrumbles

 

pattycake-hockstetter:

pattyvaje-hickstetter

 

nurserykryme:

Nursertkfyme

 

aslutforpatrickhockstetter:

Aslurforpareickhockstgter

 

captainjacksparkles:

Capfajnjacksparnles

 

trashmoutozier:

trashmoutozeri

(I DID SO WELL YES.)

 

reddietrash002:

32wwi2tr 

i literally cant type with my eyes closed what IS this

 

femmemayfield:

fennenatfuek

 

billbenbev:

Billbenbev

Omg I made it

 

newtandthediamonds:

Newtandthefuamonds

 

starryoleff:

starryoleff

 

queenbyers:

wueenbterd

 

2ds-leg-hair:

e2eeec-’dhphipzoc

 

murdocmorelikemurcock:

Murdicmorelikemurcock

how did i

Miss.. like

One lETTER

 

ask-theforgottenone:

Ask!thedorg9ttej9je

Yes.

 

xxthelittlefawnxx:

Xxthelittkefasnxx

(( Aw so close! ))

 

officialwilfordwarfstache:

offi ialwilfordwarfstache

fUCKING-

 

splatoon-jim:

splatoon-jim

guys,,,did you,,,,not memorize and forever ingrain to your memory the location of every key ever

 

snowwolf5552:

snowwolf5552

splat, I did-

 

lizawithazed:

Lizawuthaeew4d

well i started off well but uh then i forgot where z was

 

prince-atom:

prince-atom

To be fair, I’m pro.

 

heroofthreefaces:

heriija

I had to give up because my keyboard is too sensitive and the keys were depressing while I was reaching. (but i’d already blown it)

 

pedanther:

pedanther

Also I’m typing this entire paragraph with my eyes closed. When I was a boy, our home computer (in the days when it was unusual for any home to have more than one computer, if that) had a game on it that taught touch-typing, and I played it a lot. Then And I’ve done enough typing since then to keep the skill fresh. I don’t know if my dad was being foresighted about what his children’s future was likely to hold’ he may have got the game for himself originally; lots of record-keeping in his job, which meant lots of typing once the computers arrived.

 

justice-turtle:

jusrice-turtle

That went better than expected, considering I’m on my phone. On my laptop I can match pedanther’s accuracy, for much the same reason. Do the youths not learn touch typing any longer?

brin-bellway

I wouldn’t necessarily say that I *learned* touch-typing, per se. I learned to touch-type the same way that (I am told) I learned to read: there was little to no deliberate effort involved, it just sort of *happened* given enough exposure. (So my question is, not “do the youths not learn it any longer”, but “do the youth not type enough to learn touch-typing by osmosis?”)

(And yes, I did type the rest of this with my eyes closed. I did open my eyes to check whether I’d erased enough when backspacing, though, but only for rephrasings and not typos..)

Tags:

#I mean there was a touch-typing game but I don’t think that was the main driving force #the timing doesn’t add up #reply via reblog #definitely reblogged this post before (or another post doing the same thing) #and made a similar comment then #different comment chain this time though

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

cakehorse:

hello i’m back (for now). i disappeared because i stopped enjoying this website so just…stopped logging in. i don’t know if i will stick around this time. i mostly just logged in because i was getting followed by tons of porn bots and wanted to know why. inexplicable as always.

what i have been up to in my absence: working, reading, attempting to socialize irl, transitioning, becoming a The Good Place evangelist, trying out literally every antidepressant, going for walks.

please tell me what you’ve been up to and what terrible posts i have missed out on

Some things I’ve been up to: bailing the sinking ship that is my household’s finances (been doing a lot of that; still sinking, but more slowly), getting a job in fast food (as part of previous thing), considering changing my major (currently taking introductory accounting as part of figuring this out), spectating a Tumblr group roleplay (warning: most stuff in that tag makes no sense out of context), getting back into Flight Rising (didn’t post about that part).

Re: terrible posts, I’ve gotten pretty good at avoiding terrible posts over the years, so I’m not sure. There’s that Tide-pods meme, I suppose. In less-terrible posts, a new meme I’ve seen going around recently is sorting characters by how they would react to children begging them for McDonalds.

I’ve been hearing a lot of praise for The Good Place, from a lot of different directions. I have some secondhand knowledge of it, but I haven’t actually watched it (partly because I’ve been busy, partly because video’s not all that good a format for me in general). (I have not ruled out the possibility that I might watch it at some point.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog