reply via reblog

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

orbispelagium:

Somehow Panera Bread is fixed in my mind as the utmost tepid, middlebrow, strip-mall-restaurant-for-people-who-think-they’re-too-good-for-strip-mall-restaurants kind of place.

Maybe it’s telling that it was founded by an alum from my college.

I think of Panera Bread as “McDonalds, but tastes better, less likely to give me stomachaches, and has no branches open in my area.”

Tags:

#not that I would go there if there *were* branches nearby #I’m generally too poor for even McDonalds-level restaurants these days #maybe a couple times a year #reply via reblog #food

Anonymous asked: How are you managing to be underweight in a country where obesity is correlated with poverty?

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

brin-bellway:

sinesalvatorem:

Poor people in the US are overweight because they substitute higher-quality expensive food for lower-quality cheap food. I’m underweight because I substitute eating for… Not doing that.

Preparing food costs me a huge number of spoons, I have almost no ability to transport myself to places that sell cheaply prepared food, and food delivery is never cheap. Given these options, not actually eating usually makes perfect sense.

(food cw, disordered eating cw)

(I’ve heard rumours the first-degree ask bug might have been fixed. Let’s find out.)

>>I have almost no ability to transport myself to places that sell cheaply prepared food<<

How are you defining “prepared”?

When you make/attempt spoon-consuming homemade food, where are you getting the ingredients from? Stores that sell ingredients usually also sell granola bars, peanut butter, crackers, I was going to say apples but then I remembered your sensory issues. Bananas if you can take them sensory-wise and reliably eat them during the ~3-day window between underripe and overripe. If you have the spoons to reliably handle refrigerators, orange juice (consume within 1.5 – 2 weeks of opening), and if you’ve the lactose tolerance for it, cheddar (only buy it if it’s on sale) and milk (American milk lasts longer than Canadian milk, 1 – 2 weeks instead of 3 – 5 days).

These suggestions might not work for you, but if they don’t, I’d be interested to know why. You’re not the first person I’ve seen jump straight from homemade food to takeout when they ran out of spoons, without passing through granola bars first*, which makes me wonder if there’s reasons I’m missing.

*Which I find are less effort than takeout, making it all the more confusing to me.

Okay, ask bug not fixed. Please see above post.

Tags:

#(copied tags:) #lately I’ve been crunching the price-per-calorie numbers on the foods I eat regularly #and I am frequently surprised by how *cheap* food is #I can feed myself for a day for like 5 – 7 dollars *without even actively trying to save money* #less if I’m trying #(though part of that’s low metabolism) #(and I don’t know how the prices differ around San Francisco) #reply via reblog #food #disordered eating

Anonymous asked: How are you managing to be underweight in a country where obesity is correlated with poverty?

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

sinesalvatorem:

Poor people in the US are overweight because they substitute higher-quality expensive food for lower-quality cheap food. I’m underweight because I substitute eating for… Not doing that.

Preparing food costs me a huge number of spoons, I have almost no ability to transport myself to places that sell cheaply prepared food, and food delivery is never cheap. Given these options, not actually eating usually makes perfect sense.

(food cw, disordered eating cw)

(I’ve heard rumours the first-degree ask bug might have been fixed. Let’s find out.)

>>I have almost no ability to transport myself to places that sell cheaply prepared food<<

How are you defining “prepared”?

When you make/attempt spoon-consuming homemade food, where are you getting the ingredients from? Stores that sell ingredients usually also sell granola bars, peanut butter, crackers, I was going to say apples but then I remembered your sensory issues. Bananas if you can take them sensory-wise and reliably eat them during the ~3-day window between underripe and overripe. If you have the spoons to reliably handle refrigerators, orange juice (consume within 1.5 – 2 weeks of opening), and if you’ve the lactose tolerance for it, cheddar (only buy it if it’s on sale) and milk (American milk lasts longer than Canadian milk, 1 – 2 weeks instead of 3 – 5 days).

These suggestions might not work for you, but if they don’t, I’d be interested to know why. You’re not the first person I’ve seen jump straight from homemade food to takeout when they ran out of spoons, without passing through granola bars first*, which makes me wonder if there’s reasons I’m missing.

*Which I find are less effort than takeout, making it all the more confusing to me.

Tags:

#lately I’ve been crunching the price-per-calorie numbers on the foods I eat regularly #and I am frequently surprised by how *cheap* food is #I can feed myself for a day for like 5 – 7 dollars *without even actively trying to save money* #less if I’m trying #(though part of that’s low metabolism) #(and I don’t know how the prices differ around San Francisco) #food #disordered eating

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The only personality test the internet needs

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

roachpatrol:

jumpingjacktrash:

pomrania:

pomrania:

  • Hogwarts house
  • favoured RPG class
  • would you fuck a clone of yourself

If you don’t want everyone knowing who you are, just send me an ask on anon with your results. I’m curious as to if there’s a correlation between these, because I am a nerd.

  • slytherin
  • ranger
  • no, but i’d team up on seebs :D
  • slytherin
  • rogue
  • yes (if they were down for it)
  • Mostly Ravenclaw, maybe some Slytherin
  • Wizard
  • Maybe? I’d be more willing to fuck a fork* than a non-fork, because I trust myself but I don’t trust other people. But we might be too awkward, and I’m not sure the logistics work out. Do we draw straws to see who gets stuck with topping? Take turns?

*I’m assuming by “clone” you mean a full copy, rather than just “time-delayed identical twin”. I’m not into incest.

Tags:

#meme #nsfw?

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sinesalvatorem:

sinesalvatorem:

allthingslinguistic:

Boops boops Boops boops boops boops Boops boops is the new Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

@endecision, @lethriloth, and @ other roommates with no Tumblrs.

Oh, actually, this is a good place to get survey data on an interesting question of linguistics. Could as many people as possible please take this survey on whether certain constructions seem grammatical to you so I can answer a problem that’s been bugging my household.

I’m not sure whether “homeschooled with English-language schoolbooks by a native-English-speaking mother” qualifies as “>10 years in an English-language school system” for your purposes. I clicked “no”, because normally when people ask me if I’ve spent >10 years in a school system the correct answer is “no”, but now I’m having second thoughts.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #survey #signal boost #homeschool

On matched betting

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

jbeshir:

reasonableapproximation:

I decided to do a little bit of matched betting to earn a small amount of money. I used the guide at https://matchedbettingblog.com (and their calculator.

So far:

  • I made about £10 profit from Coral, which is lower than it should have been but partly because I misread their odds for my qualifying bet and lost ~£3 on that instead of ~£0.50. This was a few weeks ago, now I’m doing a second bet.
  • I chose ComeOn for my second because they had a £10 free bet, and small bets require less stake. They aren’t a very good website. I had trouble finding things to bet on and they don’t seem to offer very good odds. I expect to make about £6.50 profit from them. (I’m betting on France v Paraguay which started a few minutes ago.)
  • My betfair liability is ~£40 to make £7 on a £10 bet. To extract closer to £10 (well, £9.50 thanks to commission), liability needs to go up crazy fast. Also, if my free bet was x times larger, liability would also need to go up x times. (“Liability” here is not how much money I risk losing, but how much I need to have in betfair. If I lose that money it just means I gain money somewhere else. But betfair is the convenient place for it to be.)
  • This does not seem a very time-efficient way of earning money, though I do expect to get faster.
  • When I withdrew money from Coral it went into my paypal account. I think I can use that money as partial payment when I make charity donations, maybe? I’m not entirely sure how to use it if not, I can link a bank account to my paypal account but effort.
  • I should probably sign up for Smarkets, but I already had a betfair account so I’ve been using them.
  • It looks like I have a free £5 bet from betfair? I’m not sure where that’s from. Presumably it’s stake not returned, so… I’m not sure how to calculate my optimal strategy using it. I could do the arithmetic, but I might just use it to place a bet, for simplicity.
  • It’s possible to do this as an ongoing thing, but it doesn’t seem very convenient. It looks like you need to do things like “place bet on this game while it’s in play”, which is only like a two hour window (and ideally you place at half time to avoid odds moving, which is even shorter), and you only get a few pounds at a time.
  • I’ve heard that this does bad things to my credit score. I don’t know how much I should care.
  • I have not received noticeable amounts of annoying emails from Coral or Betfair. Or ComeOn, but too soon to tell with them.

I made upwards of a grand from this during the last year and a bit; I did it fairly intensively for a while farming easier/larger signup bonuses, and then just settled into collecting money whenever any of the betting sites I’d signed up for sent me an email offer I could turn into free money readily.

A common thing is that I get an email offering me a free in-play bet of up to £50 if I place a same-size pre-match bet, which means by being around at the time of the match and jumping on it I get a free £30-£35ish. Just today, though, I woke up to an email offer from Betfair for a refund on losses up to £100 on bets settled today or tomorrow, and set myself up with them against Smarkets to get a free guaranteed £75-£80ish out of that. The annoying emails are not really annoying! They are actually quite handy. They think you are a potential gambling addict and will offer you free money, and you can be like “sure thank you I will take your free money”.

Smarkets is better for any markets with enough volume; I would sign up, it’s worth it for the 2% commission vs 5%. You will still need to use Betfair for any markets where volume is low. You also will need Smarkets to match Betfair; if you try to match Betfair with themselves they will get angry and refuse to give you the offer, and maybe bar your account if especially pissy. Betfair never used to send out offers, but this is the second I’ve had from them in the past few months so maybe they’ve shifted strategies.

The biggest individual profits I made were from large signup free credit offers, which were in the region of £200 but had to be turned over lots of times so it only nets to about £120ish. /do/ account for accumulating losses to cycling; things which have to turned over more than ~5 times are liable to either be a lot less profitable than they look or actually a net loss, because each matched pair makes a small guaranteed loss leaking your profit.

Matched betting really does work! The big limiter is that you need to do a lot of research to understand what you’re doing, and you need to stick to common sports or else deal very carefully with differences in adjudication between markets, so we’re talking this being for quite clever people, and you need upwards of a grand in capital for any of the bigger things; to jump on that offer I got today, I had to have £800ish around to tie up for the next week or so (withdrawal is reliable and safe, but takes days, unlike the instant deposit) and I had to have it immediately on hand.

This limits the people who do it enough that we’re an acceptable business expense to hook the potential gambling addicts they’re after. It does emphasise how often they must hook people and how much they must get, though, that they will put so much free money out there as bait. That said, I’m not sure how many of the big signup offers are still around, and I get the impression an increasing number of offers are designed to be hard to match.

…are British gambling companies more trustworthy than American ones?

Word in American supplementary-income circles is, if you think you’ve found a loophole in a set of gambling rules that will allow you to get risk-free money out of it, the loophole will usually turn out not to exist. If necessary, casinos will straight-up lie about what they will and will not do, in order to prevent you from exploiting it. (I’ve heard so many stories of casinos that just *didn’t pay* a promised sign-up bonus, and didn’t respond to messages about it.)

*Sometimes* you get places that actually give you the bonuses they say they will, under the circumstances they say they will. But because a significant portion of them don’t, and you don’t know for sure which category any given instance will be in (and you can’t necessarily trust that it will at least be consistent person-to-person), the money is no longer risk-free: you’re meta-gambling.

Tags:

#(stuff like this is probably part of why I’ve acquired an alief that any company advertising online is untrustworthy) #(I have to actively fight the tendency to reduce my level of goodwill towards a company I already liked if I see online ads for them) #the only way to get guaranteed money out of a gambling place is to help them inflate their search-engine rankings #by pretending to do a legitimate search for gambling-related keywords and then clicking their link in the search results #and sticking around just long enough #to trick the search algorithm into thinking you were interested in the site (and it was therefore a good match) #every so often you find some on Mechanical-Turk-type places paying four cents per click #though I haven’t seen any in a while so it’s possible Google outsmarted them once and for all #reply via reblog #gambling #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #adventures in human capitalism

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sinesalvatorem:

bordering-lines:

anonbinarymess:

sinesalvatorem:

I feel unreasonably pleased with the fact that my preferences are so strange that, even when someone purposefully trolled my dating quiz aiming for the lowest possible score, they STILL scored 20 points due to me being a weirdo :p

Specifically, for the question of what they might do if I seemed upset, they selected “initiate sex” (despite previously claiming to be ace). For most people, that would probably be a pretty crass response. However, I find it to be quite positive and VERY distracting, so it pretty consistently makes me stop feeling bad.

Unsurprisingly, no one has non-trollingly selected this answer, because they don’t want to look like an asshole. (Even though, in my peculiar case, “doing romantic things at me” and “fucking me” are the best possible options.)

I chose romantic stuff, but initiate sex would’ve been my second choice provided my partner wasn’t like… pissed at ME and just at the world. #badcopingmechanisms

Wait is this uncommon? Romantic and sexual things are *often* My preference as a response to me being upset. Not always, but often. Is that like… not a normal thing?

I’m not sure. However, I do get the impression that most people would see initiating sex with an upset person as taking advantage of them. This is not at all how it would work for me, but I can understand people who expect this and shy away from it because of that. I think “doing romantic things at [partner]” is less likely to be seen this way, which is why far more people were OK with that.

It would at least be interesting to find out what fraction of people have a positive opinion vs a negative opinion of their partner initiating sex when they’re upset.

As someone who originally thought picking “initiate sex” on that survey would be a bad idea:

My line of reasoning was “Upset people don’t want to have sex, so trying will just piss them off (further), and possibly cause them to take out their upsetness on you. Maybe not so much that last part with Alison specifically, but there’s still the pissing-off problem, so still not a good idea.”

(I did pick romantic stuff, though, because that seemed like upset people would be more amenable to it.)

So it seems like the problem is “more variation than expected in what upset people are amenable to”.

Tags:

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

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

transgirlkyloren:

brin-bellway:

transgirlkyloren:

I think if you’re writing porn online in this day and age and you have any sort of audience, even if you say “18+ only”, some teenagers are going to read it

(as well as some older people who for whatever reason don’t have much sexual and romantic experience)

and so part of Doing Porn Ethically is trying to make your porn something that you’d be okay with a very inexperienced person reading and drawing conclusions about sex from. and so some of that is trying to be realistic about the emotions involved with sex, about safer sex practices, about sexual ethics, and about the mechanics of sex and then when for whatever reason you don’t want to be realistic signposting ACTUALLY USING CONDOMS IS A VERY GOOD IDEA AND YOU SHOULD NOT RAPE OR ABUSE PEOPLE AND ALSO COME IS GENERALLY PRODUCED IN MUCH SMALLER QUANTITIES THAN THIS STORY CLAIMS

(I have a nagging feeling that I’ve misunderstood something here. I will tentatively post this anyway, but I might have gotten something wrong. (Although it’s also possible that the thing I’m wrong about is the sense that I’ve misunderstood something.))

—

Hmm. I’m so biased in favour of this that I can’t tell whether or not I actually agree with it on its own merits, rather than agreeing on the grounds of “I personally enjoy porn more when it’s about realistic ethical stuff, and I would like to encourage people to write their porn in a way I prefer”.

(Like…judging from context, this post was likely inspired by a post from yournaturalstate. I dislike yournaturalstate’s work primarily because it’s *unpleasant*, before even getting into any ethical considerations.)

—

I’m not sure whether this is a point in favour, or a point against, or a tangent, but it’s something related:

Mind-control porn in particular has problems with people insisting on putting blanket Do Not Try This At Home warnings on *everything*. Even things that are actually perfectly ethical and realistic. Even things that are thinly fictionalised scene logs of sex the author actually had (as an enthusiastically consenting bottom).

Written on the entrance to the largest and most well-known mind-control erotica repository are the words:

“The situations described here are at best impossible or at worst highly immoral in real life. Anyone wishing to try this stuff for real should seek psychological help and/or get a life.” (emphasis original)

(This warning is *not true*. Not in all cases.)

So personally, when I think of porn messing up impressionable teenagers, I think of teenagers being told they have to choose between being ethical (or safe) and satisfying their most deeply held desires. This dilemma is terrible enough when it *actually exists*; we *should not tell people it exists where it does not*, should not inflict that on more people than absolutely necessary.

(I say this as a former impressionable teenager falsely told her sexuality could not be safely fulfilled.)

…now that I’ve written that out, I guess this section is a point in-favour-but-with-reservations, pointing out a possible failure mode of a generally good idea. (And a failure mode the original context in question is particularly prone to, at that.)

(Well, okay, yournaturalstate specifically is not prone to it *enough*. But still, I’ve learned the hard way how easy it is to swing too far the other way.)

I think that noting which things are actually perfectly ethical and realistic is, in fact, part of having your porn be good sex ed. Misinforming people is bad sex ed. 

An excellent point. I agree.

Tags:

#the actual message of this response could probably have been conveyed just as well with a ”like” #I’m reblogging mostly so that people following me but not you can see this bit #reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #conversational aglets

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

transgirlkyloren:

I think if you’re writing porn online in this day and age and you have any sort of audience, even if you say “18+ only”, some teenagers are going to read it

(as well as some older people who for whatever reason don’t have much sexual and romantic experience)

and so part of Doing Porn Ethically is trying to make your porn something that you’d be okay with a very inexperienced person reading and drawing conclusions about sex from. and so some of that is trying to be realistic about the emotions involved with sex, about safer sex practices, about sexual ethics, and about the mechanics of sex and then when for whatever reason you don’t want to be realistic signposting ACTUALLY USING CONDOMS IS A VERY GOOD IDEA AND YOU SHOULD NOT RAPE OR ABUSE PEOPLE AND ALSO COME IS GENERALLY PRODUCED IN MUCH SMALLER QUANTITIES THAN THIS STORY CLAIMS

(I have a nagging feeling that I’ve misunderstood something here. I will tentatively post this anyway, but I might have gotten something wrong. (Although it’s also possible that the thing I’m wrong about is the sense that I’ve misunderstood something.))

—

Hmm. I’m so biased in favour of this that I can’t tell whether or not I actually agree with it on its own merits, rather than agreeing on the grounds of “I personally enjoy porn more when it’s about realistic ethical stuff, and I would like to encourage people to write their porn in a way I prefer”.

(Like…judging from context, this post was likely inspired by a post from yournaturalstate. I dislike yournaturalstate’s work primarily because it’s *unpleasant*, before even getting into any ethical considerations.)

—

I’m not sure whether this is a point in favour, or a point against, or a tangent, but it’s something related:

Mind-control porn in particular has problems with people insisting on putting blanket Do Not Try This At Home warnings on *everything*. Even things that are actually perfectly ethical and realistic. Even things that are thinly fictionalised scene logs of sex the author actually had (as an enthusiastically consenting bottom).

Written on the entrance to the largest and most well-known mind-control erotica repository are the words:

“The situations described here are at best impossible or at worst highly immoral in real life. Anyone wishing to try this stuff for real should seek psychological help and/or get a life.” (emphasis original)

(This warning is *not true*. Not in all cases.)

So personally, when I think of porn messing up impressionable teenagers, I think of teenagers being told they have to choose between being ethical (or safe) and satisfying their most deeply held desires. This dilemma is terrible enough when it *actually exists*; we *should not tell people it exists where it does not*, should not inflict that on more people than absolutely necessary.

(I say this as a former impressionable teenager falsely told her sexuality could not be safely fulfilled.)

…now that I’ve written that out, I guess this section is a point in-favour-but-with-reservations, pointing out a possible failure mode of a generally good idea. (And a failure mode the original context in question is particularly prone to, at that.)

(Well, okay, yournaturalstate specifically is not prone to it *enough*. But still, I’ve learned the hard way how easy it is to swing too far the other way.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

unknought:

I’m lying in the dark and something like oblivion starts to flood my mind. Am I falling asleep? It occurs to me that I don’t actually know. For all the thousands of times I’ve fallen asleep, I can’t remember a single one. I don’t know what it feels like to stop being conscious. If I am in fact falling asleep right now, I realize, then what I’m experiencing in this moment will be gone from my mind when I wake up.

A tiny part of my mind panics: I don’t want to be erased! I don’t want to die! I’m jolted back to full consciousness. I lie still for a while, my thoughts slow, my mind starts to fill with something thick and sluggish and quiet, a part of me panics again. Not most of me; I know that I need to sleep. But enough of me to manage a veto, or at least a filibuster.

In the morning I wake up. I remember the cycle of drifting off towards probably-sleep and being repeatedly pulled back by a tiny fear of oblivion. I don’t remember how it ended.

Saaaaame.

(My feelings about this are so complicated and connected to so much other stuff in my head that it’s hard to really express them properly/coherently. And it might be TMI anyway.)

(I get the impression from reading about other people’s experiences that there’s quite a range of hypnagogic recall ability, and I’m towards the worse end of the scale. TBH, #1 quality-of-life tweak I would make to the human brain is improved hypnagogic recall. Since there are already people who have it, it’s clearly possible to set up a brain that way.)

Tags:

#obligate dozing fetishism + poor hypnagogic recall + psychological Issues regarding memory and existence = cruel joke of Nature #(of course it’s bedtime now isn’t it) #(I suppose I shall go nobly sacrifice very-near-future!me for a better-rested tomorrow) #(like every goddamn night) #reply via reblog #amnesia cw #death tw #infohazards #(you can really see the mishmash of grandfathered blacklist-tag formats on posts like this) #sexuality and lack thereof #people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me