reply via reblog

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

justice-turtle:

(not to mention we’re all broke anyway. like other than that salient point. ;P I don’t even know who I’d ask to borrow money from, just the mechanics of long-distance money transfer when you haven’t got a bank account are really very frustrating)

Could you do a workaround with gift cards?

This is easier with places like Amazon, who explicitly support emailing store credit to people, but even some corporeal stores have setups that allow for transfers over the Internet.

Consider the following scenario:

Step 1: Alice, who lives in Ontario, goes to her local Tim Hortons restaurant and buys the lowest-denomination gift card available (probably $5).

Step 2: Alice goes to the Tim Hortons website and creates an account.

Step 3: Alice types in the long string of numbers on the back of her gift card, and the shorter string of numbers hidden behind scratchcard-like material on the back of the gift card. This registers the card to her account, granting it theft protection and–more importantly, in this case–the ability to transfer credit between one card registered to her and another.

(If Alice already has a registered Tim Hortons gift card lying around, she can skip Steps 1 – 3.)

Step 4: Bob, who lives 2000km away in Alberta, goes to his local Tim Hortons restaurant and buys a $20 gift card.

Step 5: Bob emails/IMs/communicates to Alice the two strings of numbers on his card.

Step 6: Alice registers Bob’s card to her account.

Step 7: Alice transfers the credit on “her” second card to her first card. Bob has now given Alice $20.

I don’t know if you have any gas station chains (or other stores selling stuff you need, but I gather you’re in particular need of gasoline atm) nearby with that kind of gift-card system, but it might be something to consider.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #I know this post is a couple days ago but this just occurred to me this afternoon #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #adventures in human capitalism

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

vortex-atom:

nihilsupernum replied to your post: I feel like I should clarify that those shitposts…

have we ever met someone who is eligible to donate blood

are we sure theyre real

blood donations are fake

I know some rat-adj people who can donate blood, but I don’t want to out them as total squares.

My life is *extremely* boring blood-donation-suitability-wise (no sex ever, no travel outside the US/Canada zone ever, no black-market drugs ever, no prescription meds in the past year). About the only screening questions I *don’t* breeze through are “do you have the iron to spare” (sometimes I actually don’t; good thing they test that one first so if you fail there you haven’t wasted much time), “have you left Canada at all in the past two months” (oh, it was just New York/Massachusetts? that’s fine, go ahead), and “have you received a vaccination in the past three months” (oh, it was just a flu shot last month? that’s fine, go ahead).

It’s okay, I don’t mind being a total square.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #blood donation

Why do porn blogs that seem like bots follow me on tumblr? – Quora

Link ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

{{Title link: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-porn-blogs-that-seem-like-bots-follow-me-on-tumblr }}

ilzolende:

thegestianpoet:

fishbone76:

In case you wanna know why so many porn blogs follow you.

absolutely the most riveting part of this is that the person writing this response opens with “I post one picture a day of my goats” 

So what you’re saying is that Tumblr needs to put nofollow attributes on links in the notes? (Is that a theme thing or a Tumblr thing? IDK.)

I’ll believe that this is part of it, but I don’t think this is the whole story. Vanilla porn bots seem pretty indiscriminate, but kink porn bots didn’t start following me until I started leaving notes on legit blogs about the same kinks. That seems more advertisement-like.

(Either way, I block them. It may or may not limit their spread, but if nothing else my follower count is more accurate.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #Tumblr: a User’s Guide

Yahoo reports big loss, writes down Tumblr value

Link ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

{{Title link: http://www.ctvnews.ca/business/yahoo-reports-big-loss-writes-down-tumblr-value-1.2992361 }}

justice-turtle:

odditycollector:

I FUCKING KNEW IT.

SO. IF YOU KNOW YOUR FANDOM HISTORY, YOU CAN SEE THE WRITING ON THE WALL RIGHT NOW.

AND IN CASE YOU DON’T, I will tell you a story.

I don’t know if Yahoo as a corporate entity hates fandom, or if it LOVES fandom in the way a flame longs to wrap its embrace around a forest. Or maybe it’s just that fandom is an enticingly big and active userbase; but just by the nature of our enterprise, we are extremely difficult to monetize.

It doesn’t matter.

Once upon a time – in the era before anyone had heard of google – if you wanted to post fandom (or really, ANY) content, you made your own webpage out of nested frames and midi files. And you hosted it on GeoCities.

GeoCities was free and… there. If the internet of today is facebook and tumblr and twitter, the internet of the late 90s WAS GeoCities.

And then Yahoo bought GeoCities for way too much money and immediately made some, let’s say, User Outreach Errors. And anyway, the internet was getting more varied all the time, fandom mostly moved on – it wasn’t painful. GeoCities was free hosting, not a community space – but the 90s/early 00s internet was still there, preserved as if in amber, at GeoCities.com.

Until 2009, when Yahoo killed it. 15 years of early-internet history – a monument to humanity’s masses first testing the potential of the internet, and realizing they could build anything they wanted… And what they wanted to build was shines to Angel from BtVS with 20 pages of pictures that were too big to wait for on a 56k modem, interspersed with MS Word clipart and paragraphs of REALLY BIG flashing fushia letters that scrolled L to R across the page. And also your cursor would become a different MS Word clipart, with sparkles.

(So basically nothing has changed, except you don’t have to personally hardcode every entry in your tumblr anymore. Progress!)

And it was all wiped out, just like that. Gone. (except on the wayback machine, an important project, but they didn’t get everything) The weight of that loss still hurts. The sheer magnitude…

Imagine a library stocked with hundreds of thousands of personal journals, letters, family photographs, eulogies, novels, etc. dated from a revolutionary period in history, and each one its only copy. And then one day, its librarians become tired of maintaining it, so they set the library and all its contents on fire.

And watch as the flames take everything.

Brush the ash from their hands.

Walk away.

Once upon a time – in the era after everyone had heard of google, but still mostly believed them about “Don’t be evil” – fandom had a pretty great collective memory. If someone posted a good fic, or meta, or art, or conversation relevant to your interests? Anywhere? (This was before the AO3, after all.) You could know p much as soon – or as many years late – as you wanted to.

Because there was a tagging site – del.icio.us – that fandom-as-a-whole used; it was simple, functional, free, and there. Yahoo bought it in 2005. Yahoo announced they were closing it in 2010.

They ended up selling it instead, but not all the data went with it – many users didn’t opt to the migration. And even then, the new version was busted. Basically unusable for fannish searching or tagging purposes. This is the lure and the danger of centralization, I guess.

It is like fandom suffered – collectively – a brain injury. Memories are irrevocably lost, or else they are not retrievable without struggle. New ones aren’t getting formed. There is no consensus replacement.

We have never yet recovered.

Once upon a time… Yahoo bought tumblr.

I don’t know how you celebrated the event, but I spent it backing up as much as I could, because Yahoo’s hobby is collecting the platforms that fandom relies on and destroying them.

I do not think Yahoo is “bad” – I am criticizing them on their own site, after all, and I don’t expect any retribution. I genuinely hope they sort out their difficulties.

But they are, historically, bad for US.

And right now is a good time to look at what you’ve accumulated during your career on this platform, and start deciding what you want to pack and what can be left behind to become ruins. And ash.

…On a cheerier note, wherever we settle next will probably be much better! This was never a good place to build a city.

Fucknuggets. I have so much goddamn shit to save. Writing notes, mostly.

(As an elder fan myself, I don’t think OP is overstating the case at all. :P)

I use this Tumblr backup-creation program. The archive it makes isn’t all that searchable, but at least you can pick through it at your leisure. Plus, it only uses the publicly available parts of a blog, so you can also use it on blogs you don’t own.

(One of the blogs I tested it on was yours, and when I set my computer up to automatically run a Tumblr backup update every night at 10 PM, I left your name on the list of blogs to keep. As such, I own a full local copy of your Tumblr. If you can’t get the backup program to run yourself but can find a feasible way for me to send you a ~2.5GB ZIP file, I can send you a copy.)

(I also pasted all of the stuff in my inbox into a Word document, and I keep my messaging archives separated into one Word document per person.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #amnesia cw #(I know that warning’s not technically right) #(but there’s enough thematic overlap that it feels appropriate) #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

sdhs-rationalist:

rusalkii:

ambivalencerelations:

rusalkii:

Does anyone know of any reason why someone shouldn’t eat exclusively bananas, apple sauce, those round red cheese ball things, and sugar cubes for lunch for three weeks? Uh, asking for a friend.

I would like to meet this… friend.

*waves* Apparently I was too subtle. Look, I didn’t choose the Anxiety Diet, it’s just that going out to buy food at work is stressful, and packing anything but snacks at my aunt and uncle’s is also stressful, and work has bananas and sugar cubes. Hence, my question.

c.f. why my intake of snacks has drastically increased

What’s wrong with fruit and cheese? Totally legit lunch. Surviving exclusively on them for three weeks might run into some difficulties, but if it’s just for lunch that doesn’t seem like a big deal to me.

(Speaking as someone whose non-dinner diet is mostly pretty…I don’t know if “atomised” is quite the right word here. Things that are individual food units in themselves, like “banana” or “peanut butter” or “yogurt”, rather than mixing lots of ingredients together into something meal. My food-unit selection is also fairly limited: there are the basic food groups, “fruit”, “dairy”, “nuts”, “protein” (usually mixed into the dinner meal), “chocolate”, “starch”, with usually ~2 – 3 possible foods in each category (not always the same 2 – 3 over time) and making some effort to cover as many categories as possible on any given day. My nutrition seems to be doing fine.)

Tags:

#food #reply via reblog #disordered eating?

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

bookofjustice:

It’s not… very clear? The basic explanation of geth in the codex is that they’re pretty much like Erythro – one geth alone is only slightly smarter than a brick, but ten geth networked together are like a small brain, and a thousand or a million geth are more smarterer. (Possibly exponentially, but I get picky about the definition of “exponentially”. ^_^)

But then you have the fact that when geth talk about themselves they use “this unit” for “I”, suggesting some sort of concept of individuality. You’ve got the story of the long-ago geth who asked its quarian overseer, “Does this unit have a soul?”, freaking out the overseer and the rest of the quarians with the realization that they’d crossed the line to self-aware AI life from really advanced VIs (example of the latter: Avina with her “I am not programmed to respond in that area, my code is limited to information and simple interaction simulations”).

And then you have Legion in ME2, who’s stated to be a thousand-odd geth “runtimes” walking around in a single high-powered body, but who still refers to itself as “this unit” and reports on the consensus decisions of its… internal geth? idek… as if it’s one person delegated to speak, like a jury foreman or something. (I mean, maybe it is, I wouldn’t be surprised if Legion-as-a-multiple-system decided to have only one personality front while talking to organics for convenience. But there’s never any hint in-game that there are other personalities associated with the other runtimes.)

And then in ME3 the Reapers give the geth code upgrades to try and help them wipe out the quarians or something, and Legion gives you a little holo-PowerPoint on how a single geth with these upgrades is smarter than ten networked geth were before; Legion specifically says at that point “I find this growth beautiful, indicative of life”. Then if you broker peace on Rannoch, Legion will try to re-upload the upgrades to the rest of the geth (they were formerly being continually broadcast from the Reaper on Rannoch, uploading and downloading in ME3 are just intensely weird okay), then it’ll say “Copying code insufficient, direct personality dissemination required”, and it’ll disseminate its runtimes to the rest of the geth collective, dying in the process in order to bring the geth “true sentience”.

I am so not up on classic skiffy shit. ;P Hell, I hadn’t even heard of “hive mind” referring exclusively to Borg-type things before – I had it in my head that it also refers to networked “brains” like Erythro. And I’m also not very well up on multiple systems or… lots of stuff. I’d be really interested in any input you might have about the geth, how you’d interpret them from what I’ve said here (bearing in mind that everything, especially ME3, can be changed if the new idea works better).

Well, I don’t know if my definition of “hive mind” is the definition, but it seems to me that any definition of “hive mind” broad enough that a single, ordinary human would qualify is too broad to be useful.

Now that I think about it, I guess you could define a “hive mind” as being composed of pieces capable of independent life rather than intelligence, which would cover Erythro (whose microbes could continue to go about their microbial lives if their connections were severed) but not a human*. Maybe that’s what the Troper was thinking.

It’s interesting that you mention multiple systems, though, because I think maybe that’s why I place more emphasis on consciousness than life in my sense of what “hive mind” means. At a relatively early age (thirteen, which is before I heard of and later read Nemesis), I encountered stuff about multiplicity, and notably grey-area stuff like blurring and median systems. When you’ve talked with both a hive entity (when they’re blurry) and the entity’s individual components (when they’re not blurry)–components that are full people in themselves but only have one body between them, capable of thinking independently but not living independently–I suppose you end up with a definition like mine.

So…hmm. I take it from the fact that Legion’s dissemination was able to carry the upgrades that Legion had the upgrades, and that would indicate that–regardless of whether or not they were before–Legion’s individual runtimes were sapient? I’m not sure if scattering would really count as dying, in that case…if they’re capable of individual consciousness but also of a single networked one, whether it’s dying probably depends on how they view themselves, really. If they think of themselves as primarily a hive entity with the option to operate as independent runtimes, or as primarily independent runtimes with the option to operate as a hive entity. Neither conception would be wrong; it’s up to them to decide which framework they use.

*Well, maybe not a human. Not the brain part, anyway. It remains to be seen how big a role a human’s microbes play.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #Mass Effect

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

responsible-reanimation:

eoskara:

When you think about it, what was the motivation for kinks in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness? 

Dunno, but I think that “virile, manly strangers impregnating your spouse” was only added in as a hilarious curveball.

(Terrible ass-pull theory: it’s good to spread your genes far and wide, and therefore good to be attracted to a range of weird stuff?)

My personal favourite ass-pull theory:

Kinks are the beginning of the atrophying of the human sex drive.

Yes, the decoupling of “if pleasurable PIV, then procreation” wasn’t widespread until very recently, but decoupling the other way–“if procreation, then pleasurable PIV” happened a long time ago. Humans are smart, communicative, and capable of enduring short-term discomfort in pursuit of long-term goals. Therefore, the procreative act need not be pleasant, nor need it be intuitive: humans will do it regardless.

My heavily warped sex drive presents no barrier whatsoever to my reproductive success. I learned how to reproduce from other people, and if I chose I could perform these learned actions for the sake of obtaining children, without ever actually enjoying it.

When it no longer matters whether something is broken, it is free to accumulate damage. Kinks are the result of this entropy.

Tags:

#I mean my lack of desire for children *does* present a barrier to my reproductive success #but that’s another matter #reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #pregnancy cw #just so story cw

Anonymous asked: on the ableism thing: kink can also be appealing to neurodiverse people and trauma survivors. For example ND people could find relationships in which they are taken care of and controlled to be reassuring if they are bad with self control and responsibility, for autistic people it can be a sensation thing, for people bad with intuitive social cues there’s the fact that there are strictly defined safewords and “codes” of ethics, etc. But radfems would say this proves it’s bad…

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

lizardywizard:

fierceawakening:

on the ableism thing: kink can also be appealing to neurodiverse people and trauma survivors. For example ND people could find relationships in which they are taken care of and controlled to be reassuring if they are bad with self control and responsibility, for autistic people it can be a sensation thing, for people bad with intuitive social cues there’s the fact that there are strictly defined safewords and “codes” of ethics, etc. But radfems would say this proves it’s bad…

1000000% agree

Kink is often for people who can’t do relationships and sex in the supposed standard way. Radfems also want something nonstandard, but THIS IS THE PROPER NONSTANDARD THING, I TELL YOU

and I just sit here and facepalm sadly

“Kink is often for people who can’t do relationships and sex in the supposed standard way” yes yes yes yes

#also has anyone noticed that the line between what’s a kink and what’s a sexuality is very very blurry #and that sexualities are usually classed as kinks before they become Accepted Sexualities #but seriously #what is the political difference between ‘i’m only emotionally and sexually fulfilled in a relationship with another woman’ #and ‘i’m only emotionally and sexually fulfilled in a relationship with someone who will perform this role with me’ #it seems like it’s a sexuality if it involves a gender or sex of person and anything else is a kink #but that seems pretty arbitrary? #like i know that same gender love is what’s most visible and thus what gets the most hate but #whether something is a sexuality or a kink shouldn’t be defined by whether people are oppressed over it? #and people really do act like you can’t change your sexuality but you can change or give up your kinks #that your kinks are a secondary part of your sexuality #even though they may be obligate #even though they may change the entire way you relate to someone (lizardywizard)

Yes, this.

I’ve occasionally encountered people who want to reserve the word “kink” for things that are secondary parts of a person’s sexuality, and use “fetish” or sometimes “paraphilia” for the core stuff. (I’ve also met a few people–there might have been some overlap, I’m not sure–who view androsexuality and gynesexuality as being clusters of fetishes* that appear very commonly and often together, rather than putting them on a higher plane of “sexual orientation”.)

Neither group really seems to have taken off, though.

*For example, the gynesexuality cluster includes vulva fetishes, fetishes for various physical traits that estrogen causes, whatever hard-to-define thing the people with identity-based attractions to women are using, and so on.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof