the more you know

abandonedgod asked: I’m sorry, as I already mentioned, I don’t know much about prosopagnosia but I’m genuinely interested in this topic. Would you mind if I asked if you can describe what you see when you look at other people’s faces? I hope I’m not being rude.

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

abandonedgod:

brin-bellway:

I don’t think it’s rude at all, especially since I pretty much volunteered myself as an Example Prosopagnosic by answering your post (in first-person, no less).

I was born faceblind, so I don’t know what it’s like having a functional facial recognition processor. That makes it trickier to describe, since all I have to contrast it with are second-hand descriptions (which, in turn, were also tricky for them to make).

It’s not that I don’t see faces. That’s a common misconception. (To the extent that having any conception about prosopagnosia is common, though I think there’s been a lot of improvement in general awareness lately.) I just looked at my brother’s face, sitting over on the other couch, and it’s all there: pink-red lips, pale skin, nose, pimple, brown eyes, bangs. Thinking of that fresh memory, I can almost picture it. Sometimes, just for a moment, I can grasp it, but mostly the memory is blurred and lacking in detail.

(It feels perfectly natural, having it blurry like that. So natural that I didn’t even notice I was doing it until I read other prosos’ descriptions of it. There are hardly ever faces in my dreams, and that feels perfectly natural too.)

Note that my brother is one of the easiest people to picture. I’ve known him for all sixteen years of his life, and when you’re reliant on general object processing to recognise faces, experience with a given face counts for a lot. After knowing my friend Jacqueline for four years, I was able to successfully recognise her when I bumped into her in a mall*. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I’d had less experience with her and her appearance. It took me about a year, maybe a year and a half, to reliably tell her two teenage daughters apart, but after six years of knowing them I’m not sure how I ever managed to have trouble.

(It’s good that they were teenage. Children are tricky. They change quickly, so by the time you’ve built up enough experience with one face to recognise them semi-reliably, they’ve gone and gotten themselves a different one. When my brother was six, I couldn’t distinguish him from the other boys in his Cub Scout den. I didn’t feel a sense of recognition at my own face in the mirror until my mid-teens, 2 – 3 years after my face stopped developing. (Even now, I can still tell which other faces I would have trouble distinguishing from my own, had I less experience with mine. Plus, I’m not entirely sure how much of the ease is due to my large glasses.))

If you want to read more, try looking through my prosopagnosia tag or dhalim’s blog. For another, very detailed perspective, Bill Choisser’s classic book, Face Blind!, is freely available on the Internet. (I haven’t read that book since I was first learning about prosopagnosia seven years ago, so I don’t remember at exactly which points my mileage varied. I do remember it being interesting, though.) The general prosopagnosia tag on Tumblr (which I track, and is how I found your post) sometimes has good stuff in it, though there’s also the occasional non-proso using us to make Profound Statements about Seeing People for Who They Are Rather Than What They Look Like and artworks depicting faceless people (see paragraph 3).

*Malls are tough. Absolutely anyone could be in the mall, so you can’t use context to narrow the list of potential suspects. (“She’s really tall and she’s at my Girl Scout meeting, so she must be Jenny, because Jenny is the only really tall girl in my troop.”)

I honestly didn’t expect such a brilliant and detailed answer. Thank you so much for the answer, and for your patience! You’re great!

And I’ll definitely take a look on the links you shared with me.

Tags:

#(October 2014) #((but only a day after the previous post: they were right on the Sep-Oct boundary)) #conversational aglets #prosopagnosia #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #the more you know

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

thecraftychemist:

jumpingjacktrash:

jacknabber:

i-homeostasis:

i-homeostasis:

dude seeing these Mega high quality images of the surface of mars that we now have has me fucked up. Like. Mars is a place. mars is a real actual place where one could hypothetically stand. It is a physical place in the universe. ITS JUST OUT THERE LOOKING LIKE UH IDK A REGULAR OLD DESERT WITH LOTS OF ROCKS BUT ITS A WHOLE OTHER PLANET? 

LIKE THIS JUST LOOKS LIKE IT COULD BE A PERSON’S BACKYARD. LIKE YEA A LITTLE DUSTY MAYBE THERE WAS A SANDSTORM BUT THAT’S COOL I’M JUST GONNA WALK DOWN TO THE STORE P S Y C H YOU’RE ON MARS BICH!

i hate to be rude and intrude on this post but we have decent pictures of the surface Venus too! 

#venus has a low render distance

See also below Saturn’s moon, Titan. Mars has a blue horizon at sunset so it looks even more Earth-like in this image:

Source

Also: Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko

Here’s a bit more on the Titan one.

Tags:

#space #the power of science #the more you know #Venus #Mars #Titan #Rosetta #flashing gif

PSA: Stuff You Maybe Didn’t Realize You Can Back Up To AO3, And How To Tag it

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

olderthannetfic:

destinationtoast:

inu-fiction:

Tumblr seems to be in potential death throes or at least, incredibly volatile and unreliable lately, but we’ve done some pretty good and informative work on canon analysis and reference guides so I was looking for ways to back it up without losing it…and the solution became obvious to me:

Archive of Our Own, aka AO3. 

“What?” you might ask if you are less familiar with their TOS. “Isn’t that just a fanfic archive??”

No! It’s a fanWORK archive. It is an archive for fanworks in general! “Fanwork” is a broad term that encompasses a lot of things, but it doesn’t just include fanfic and fanart, vids etc; it also includes “fannish” essays and articles that fall under what’s often called “meta” (from the word for “beyond” or “above”, referencing that it goes beyond the original exact text)! The defining factor of whether Archive of Our Own is the appropriate place to post it is not whether or not it’s a fictional expansion of canon (fanfic), though that is definitely included – no, it’s literally just “is this a work by a ‘fan’ intended for other ‘fannish’ folks/of ‘fannish’ interest?” 

The articles we’ve written as a handy reference to the period-appropriate Japanese clothing worn by Inuyasha characters?  The analyses of characters? The delineations of concrete canon (the original work) vs common “fanon” (common misconceptions within the fandom)? Even the discussion of broader cultural, historical, and geographic context that applies to the series and many potential fanworks? 

All of those are fannish nonfiction! 

Which means they absolutely can (and will) have a home on AO3, and I encourage anybody who is wanting to back up similar works of “fannish interest” – ranging from research they’ve done for a fic, to character analyses and headcanons – to use AO3 for it, because it’s a stable, smooth-running platform that is ad-free and unlike tumblr, is run by a nonprofit (The OTW) that itself is run by and for the benefit of, fellow fans. 

Of course, that begs the question of how to tag your work if you do cross-post it, eh? So on that note, here’s a quick run-down of tags we’re finding useful and applicable, which I’ve figured out through a combination of trial and error and actually asking a tag wrangler (shoutout to @wrangletangle for their invaluable help!):

First, the Very Broad:

– “ Nonfiction ”. This helps separate it from fanfic on the archive, so people who aren’t looking for anything but fanfic are less likely to have to skim past it, whereas people looking for exactly that content are more likely to find it.

– while “Meta” and “Essay” and even “Information” are all sometimes used for the kinds of nonfiction and analytical works we post, I’ve been told “ Meta Essay ” is the advisable specific tag for such works. This would apply to character analyses, reference guides to canon, and even reference guides to real-world things that are reflected in the canon (such as our articles on Japanese clothing as worn by the characters).  The other three tags are usable, and I’ve been using them as well to cover my bases, but they’ll also tend to bring up content such as “essay format” fanfic or fanfic with titles with those words in them – something that does not happen with “Meta Essay”.

– I’ve also found by poking around in suggested tags, that “ Fanwork Research & Reference Guides ” is consistently used (even by casual users) for: nonfiction fannish works relating to analyses of canon materials; analyses of and meta on fandom-specific or fanwork-specific tropes; information on or guides to writing real-world stuff that applies to or is reflected in specific fandoms’ media (e.g. articles on period-appropriate culture-specific costuming and how to describe it); and expanded background materials for specific fans’ fanworks (such as how a given AU’s worldbuilding is supposed to be set up) that didn’t fit within the narrative proper and is separated out as a reference for interested readers. 

Basically, if it’s an original fan-made reference for something specific to one or more fanworks, or a research aid for writing certain things applicable to fanworks or fannish interests in general, then it can fall under that latter tag. 

– You should also mark it with any appropriate fandom(s) in the “Fandom” field. Just like you would for a fanfic, because of course, the work is specifically relevant to fans of X canon, right?

If it discusses sensitive topics, or particular characters, etc., you should probably tag for those. E.g. “death” or “mental illness”, “Kagome Higurashi”, etc. 

Additionally, if you are backing it up from a Tumblr you may wish to add:

– “ Archived From Tumblr “ and/or “ Cross-Posted From Tumblr ” to reference the original place of publication, for works originally posted to tumblr. (I advise this if only because someday, there might not be “tumblr” as we know it, and someone might be specifically looking for content that was originally on it, you never know)

– “ Archived From [blog name] Blog ”; this marks it as an archived work from a specific blog. And yes, I recommend adding the word “blog” in there for clarity- Wrangletangle was actually delighted that I bothered to tag our first archived work with “Archived From Inu-Fiction Blog” because being EXTREMLY specific about things like that is super helpful to the tag wranglers on AO3, who have to decide how to categorize/”syn” (synonym) various new tags from alphabetized lists without context of the original posting right in front of them.  In other words, including the name AND the word “blog” in it,helps them categorize the tag on the back end without having to spend extra time googling what the heck “[Insert Name Here]” was originally. 

Overall, you should be as specific and clear as possible, but those tags/tag formats should prove useful in tagging it correctly should you choose to put fannish essays and articles up on AO3 :)

Oh, and protip sidebar for those posting, especially works that are more than plain text: you can make archiving things quicker and easier for yourself, but remember to plan ahead for tumblr’s potential demise/disabling/service interruptions. 

The good news: You can literally copy and paste the ENTIRE text of a tumblr post from say, an “edit” window, on tumblr, straight into AO3′s Rich Text Format editor, and it will preserve pretty much all or almost all of the formatting – such as bold, italics, embedded links, etc!

But the bad news: keep in mind that while AO3 allows for embedded images and it WILL transfer those embedded images with a quick copy-paste like that, AO3 itself doesn’t host the images for embedding; those are still external images. This means that whether or not they continue to load/display for users, depends entirely on whether the file is still on the original external server! As I quickly discovered, in the case of posts copied from the Edit window of a tumblr post, the images will still point to the copies of the images ON tumblr’s servers. 

What this means is that you should back up (save copies elsewhere of) any embedded images that you consider vital to such posts, in case you need to upload them elsewhere and fiddle with where the external image is being pulled from, later. 

Personally, I’m doing that AND adding image descriptions underneath them, just to be on the safe side (and in fairness, this makes it more accessible to people who cannot view the images anyway, such as sight-impaired people who use screen readers or people who have images set to not automatically display on their browser, so it’s win-win)

Thanks for this helpful guide! I haven’t used some of these tags so far for the fandom stats work I’ve cross-posted to AO3, but that’s because I didn’t know about them. Great ideas! :)

I keep meaning to mass archive my Toastystats work to AO3, but I am always stymied by image hosting when trying to overcome inertia and do so. It takes time to repost all the images to external hosting (like imgur). So thus far I’ve only done it for a few major analyses, and even in some of those cases, the images are hosted on Tumblr. But I should finally get around to it. At least I’ve exported my Toastystats side blog recently, so most of my stuff should be preserved if anything should happen. But maybe this holiday break I’ll finally make more progress.

I second all of this!

I’ve also found that AO3 is the best way for me to distribute my vids. I do have to host them elsewhere, but AO3 gives me a consistent URL and a way to have useful headers with fandom/ship/etc. even if I switch hosting a hundred times.

Tags:

#101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #the more you know #AO3 #PSA

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

alwaysfaithfulterriblelizard:

this egg fucking froze because our fridge is too cold

 

o-bellaciao:

Why would you keep the eggs on the fridge?

 

alwaysfaithfulterriblelizard:

we keep our eggs in the fridge…so they don’t denature? do you not refrigerate your eggs?

 

nanner:

Because of the way our eggs are processed and the prevalence of salmonella in american chickens, americans have to fridge their eggs.

http://io9.com/americans-why-do-you-keep-refrigerating-your-eggs-1465309529

 

colorschanging:

Wait, they don’t refrigerate eggs in other countries?

 

ladyoflate:

wait what people in other countries dont refrigerate eggs???

 

wewishyouamurphychristmas:

wait a second eggs in other countries aren’t refrigerated?????????

 

agathaheterodyne:

Waht.

 

slepaulica:

yeah, we don’t refrigerate them here. they keep like a month or two, even in summer, just crack it into a cup in case it’s accidentally taken you too long to use those eggs, give it a whiff, if it smells okay you’re good to go even if it’s really old.  don’t use the float test — that turns up a lot of false positives and sometimes you end up throwing away perfectly good eggs, which is not cheap. just turn your eggs upside down every now and then to help keep them fresh and yeah.

also chicken eggs do not look anything like those things you see on american tv shows. they have brown shells and the yolks are orange.

 

triplash:

Americans refrigerate their eggs.. 

America..

 

slepaulica:

if you read the link though, there’s actually a reason for why they have to do it, a reason that doesn’t apply anywhere else in the world.

 

slepaulica:

we should organise a charity drive to mail european eggs to americans. we can send them uht milk too, i read on the internet that they only have the kind of milk that has to be refrigerated

 

brin-bellway:

Canadians refrigerate eggs too. And re: colour, every Canadian grocery store I have ever been in carried multiple brands of eggs, some of which were white and some which were brown. (We usually buy the brown: the last time I bought white it was because we realised at the last moment we were out of eggs and Mom sent me to the white-egg-only convenience store to get a dozen to tide us over.)

Who told you Americans don’t have UHT milk? I don’t know about big ones, but there are definitely single-serving ones that I think are intended for kids’ lunches. I used to go through multiple single-serving boxes* of Parmelat chocolate milk a day when I was a kid.

(Come to think of it, did they say “no room-temperature milk” or “no UHT milk”? Because while I’ve drunk well over a thousand cartons* of milk (all bought in America) that appear to fit with the definition of “UHT milk” I just looked up, I had never heard the term before.)

*The Canadian term for this is the genericised trademark “tetra pak”, but since I’m talking about my experiences as an American in America I figured I ought to use the terminology I would’ve used at the time, despite its relative lack of precision.

P.S. Maybe I should look into the possibility of larger tetras of milk, considering I just had refrigerated milk go lumpy nine days before its sell-by date (beating the previous record of six days). Bagged milksounds like a neat idea, but it’s terrible for preservation, and the manufacturers won’t even admit it.

 

slepaulica:

i don’t remember where i saw it. but it was an article on the internet and someone was saying that for a limited time they had uht milk available in the cardboard box things but it didnt catch on with americans because it was too weird that it could be stored unrefrigerated or something and they didnt sell well so it was taken off the market and it was a shame because they were really useful for people like university students who didnt have a fridge.

actually, i remember reading that they do have uht milk in the us, but they don’t sell it in the cardboard boxes but they sell it in the transparent gallon containers, and part of what gives the milk the shelf life of like a year and the need to not be refrigerated is keeping it from exposure to light, and so even though the milk is treated with an ultra high temperature to pasteurise it, it doesn’t have the 9 months-1 year shelf life because of exposure to light, so they have to keep it refrigerated anyway.

it is possible that the author of the article lived in a specific region of the us and was overgeneralising to the availability in the rest of their country.

do any other americans want to weigh in? can you go to the supermarket and buy a cardboard box of milk that is not in the refrigerated section of the store and it does not need to be refrigerated until opened? maybe i am wrong?

 

winterwhitewitch:

No we cannot, at least not where I live. (near San Francisco, CA) I didn’t even know what uht milk was until I googled it. All the milk I have ever encountered needs to be refrigerated, and I am actually shocked this isn’t a rule. 
Our milk choices range from non fat, low fat, regular, half and half (ughhhh), and there’s the vegan milk stuff. My dad drinks almond milk, which is an abomination. 
And I thought bagged milk was weird…

 

slepaulica:

Thank you for weighing in! UHT milk doesn’t have any preservatives in it. The shelf life is due to the combination of: sterile packaging, opaque packaging, and the high temperature at which it is pasteurised. once you open your box of milk, you have to drink it within a few days, and it does have to be refrigerated once opened because the packaging is no longer sealed and germs can get in, but the packages are 1 litre or a half litre, which isn’t all that much milk, so even without refrigeration, you can plan around using the entire thing before it goes bad.

a friend of mine without refrigeration would just reboil it every time she wanted to drink some, but in the summer months i just try to use it all up as soon as i open it, and in winter months it’s easier because i can just leave it outside and use it slowly over the course of a few days.

but the advantages are: not needing to refrigerate the trucks it is shipped in, not needing to refrigerate it at the store, and you can use it as an emergency food. you can stock up on it effectively without worrying about it going bad (within reason, 6-9 month shelf life) because it only starts going bad once opened.

 

sophus-b:

No we cannot, at least not where I live. (near San Francisco, CA)

You can definitely get shelf-stable milk in the Bay Area! I looked it up, and it says there’s some in stock in stock for every Whole Foods I checked, and at least half of the Safeways and Walmarts, too. And Costco has store brand shelf-stable chocolate milk, at least.

They’ve probably just hidden it away on some obscure back shelf because it’s not a popular product.

Additionally, you can get shelf-stable cream at any Trader Joe’s! (Source: I have one on my shelf right now.)

Tags:

#long post #conversational aglets #food #home of the brave #our home and cherished land #the more you know

Where to Download All the Books That Just Entered the Public Domain

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

{{Title link: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qvq99b/how-to-download-the-books-that-just-entered-the-public-domain }}

sophus-b:

dr-archeville:

Starting at midnight on January 1, tens of thousands of books (as well as movies, songs, and cartoons) entered the public domain, meaning that people can download, share, or repurpose these works for free and without retribution under US copyright law.

Per the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, “corporate” creations (like Mickey Mouse) can be restricted under copyright law for 120 years.  But per an amendment to the act, works published between 1923 and 1977 can enter the public domain 95 years after their creation.  This means that this is the first year since 1998 that a large number of works have entered the public domain.

Basically, 2019 marks the first time a huge quantity of books published in 1923 — including works by Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, and Robert Frost — have become legally downloadable since digital books became a thing.  It’s a big deal — the Internet Archive had a party in San Francisco to celebrate.  Next year, works from 1924 will enter the public domain, and so-on.

So, how do you actually download these books?

It largely depends on what site you go to, and if you can’t find a book on one site, you can probably find it on another.  For instance, ReadPrint.com, as well as The Literature Network(mostly major authors), and Librivox (audio books), Authorama (all in the public domain), and over a dozen other sites all have vast selections of free ebooks.

There’s also a handful of archiving projects that are doing extensive work to digitize books, journals, music, and other forms of media.  A blog post from Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain listed some of the most recognizable works published in 1923, as well as links to download these books on digital archiving projects Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and the Gutenberg Project.  The books include:

In total HathiTrust, a massive digital archiving project, has also uploaded more than 53,000 works published in 1923 that just entered the public domain.  Over 17,650 of them are books written in English.  Similarly, Internet Archive has already uploaded over 15,000 works written in English that year.

Project Gutenberg, which has over 58,000 free downloadable books, has digitized five works that entered the public domain in the new year: The Meredith Mystery by Natalie Sumner Lincoln, The Golden Boys Rescued by Radio L. P. Wyman, White Lightning Edwin by Herbert Lewis, The Garden of God by H. De Vere Stacpoole, and The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran.  I’m going to be perfectly honest: I recognize exactly zero of those books.  But like most if not all digital archives, Project Gutenberg had some books from 1923 available for download before January 1, 2019 (like Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf.)

If you’re interested in academic papers, Reddit user nemobis also uploaded over 1.5 million PDF files of works published in academic journals before 1923.  Your best bet for actually finding something you want to read in there is to know which academic paper you’re looking for beforehand and check the paper’s DOI number.  Then, search for the DOI in one of nemobis’s lists of works — one list includes works published until 1909, the other includes works published until 1923.

It’s worth noting that projects like Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg rely on volunteer efforts, so there’s going to be disparities in the number of books available for download depending on where you go.  But over the next several days and weeks, it’s safe to expect many more books will become available legally and for free across the web.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is tumblr_inline_nlh1og06wp1qdo426.gif

Additionally, some of the editors over at Wikimedia Commons are keeping track of what’s been uploaded/undeleted from the new public domain content.

Currently, it’s mostly art and photography, but there’s at least one Sherlock Holmes radio drama in the batch so far.

Tags:

#the more you know #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

Tomorrow is Public Domain Day!

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sophus-b:

My fellow Americans! It’s less than 24 hours until Public Domain Day!!!

Gird your loins, clean your keyboards, and fire up your scanners, because the copyright term of 1923 is finally lapsing! Tomorrow, thousands of works will become part of the public domain!

For the first time in twenty-one years, an entire year’s worth of media will become free to use, share, and remix to our heart’s content!

So tonight, watch the ball drop, grab your drink, and settle in to watch the Wikimedia uploads roll in!

Tags:

#101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #the more you know

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

brin-bellway:

gasmaskaesthetic:

My verdict on Greyhound is that it is perfectly adequate if you are constrained by money more than time. It is worse in terms of comfort than driving my own car, but better in terms of not having to pay attention. It is worse than an airplane in terms of time, better in terms of cost for moderate distances, and better in terms of the logistics of boarding and luggage management. It is, imo, identical in terms of seat comfort except that so far it seems way more likely to have a near-empty bus for portions of the trip than a near-empty airplane. Greyhound does lose some points by not being as cool as flying and getting to see the tops of clouds + all the tiny ground people.

Bet it’s more miserable than a plane during the summer, though.

It continues to weird me out that nobody ever talks about the constant ear discomfort at altitude and horrible ear pain on descent when discussing the pros and cons of airplanes. Am I unusually sensitive to pressure changes? Is this only a problem on budget airlines?

A vehicle at ground level would have to try pretty hard to be more miserable than a plane. I *cried* last time I was on a descending plane, and I do not cry easily.

(I’m not sure how much pain my brother experiences *during* flight, but he *always* gets an ear infection after plane trips. Maybe there’s some genetic thing going on.)

—

I’ve been on two-hour Greyhounds a couple times as part of Girl Guide trips, and they seemed okay. Probably would be even better now that I have a smartphone: last time I was on a Greyhound I brought no Internet-capable computers because I didn’t have any light enough to be worth lugging around the whole trip, so I didn’t get to use the Wi-Fi.

Since I am trying to make it so that my Tumblr conversations are fully readable without needing the notes available [link], here is a list of distinct branches that responded to me:

http://theaudientvoid.tumblr.com/post/181528215565/my-verdict-on-greyhound-is-that-it-is-perfectly (@gasmaskaesthetic, @dagny-hashtaggart (unpingable), @theaudientvoid)

http://judiciousimprecation.tumblr.com/post/181529320774/my-verdict-on-greyhound-is-that-it-is-perfectly (@judiciousimprecation)

https://cadmiumwanderer.tumblr.com/post/181529991193/my-verdict-on-greyhound-is-that-it-is-perfectly (@another-normal-anomaly, @cadmiumwanderer (unpingable))

http://jadagul.tumblr.com/post/181530605313/my-verdict-on-greyhound-is-that-it-is-perfectly (@jadagul)

https://humanfist.tumblr.com/post/181538993961/my-verdict-on-greyhound-is-that-it-is-perfectly (@humanfist)

And here, since they have no links of their own, are the replies:

@moral-autism: “Anecdote:I chew gum and drink water on planes and I’ve never had more than momentary minor discomfort due to pressure”

@akaltyn (unpingable): “I have literally never had any ear issues flying and I used to fly near weekly for work”

—

Some context:

I don’t have all that much flying experience: I flew a few times around ages 5 – 7, then one round trip in 2015 (age 21). The initial 2015 flight had smaller peaks of pain but more discomfort at altitude: I think maybe my ears adjusted more on the return flight, but then had further to go to adjust *back*. I had a cold on the return flight†, but I don’t think I’d reached the sinus-problems stage yet.

—

I haven’t tried gum and hadn’t heard of the special earplugs: I’ll have to bear those in mind if/when I ever go on a plane again.

@jadagul: My nose clogs easily, but with regular maintenance I can breathe through it fairly well. I would not be surprised if my nasal passages are unusually small: my ear canals definitely are.

@another-normal-anomaly: I had problems with earwax clogs as a kid, but around age 13 I grew out my fingernails so that I could use the pinkies as scoops, and since then have had no wax clogs even though I haven’t been as good at keeping my nails long enough over the past couple years.

@judiciousimprecation: If the thing you do that you can’t describe is what this other post calls “working the rumble muscle”, I *can* do that but it hurts a bit. Might be the lesser of two evils in a pinch.

I suppose this whole thing would explain why some airlines have entertainment systems with an audio component: previously I’d just assumed the airlines fancy enough to do that also had better pressurisation, so your ears were actually functional enough for movie watching. (I wasn’t *completely* deaf, and I could have short conversations and IIRC hear the announcement system, but I was in no condition to watch a movie.)

—

†I had to get back home *somehow*, the tickets were already paid for, and I wore a surgical mask. (I also wore a surgical mask on the initial flight, which I suspect was the deciding factor in why I was only in the *early* stages of a cold by the time of the return flight: I bought myself an extra few days by contracting the neighbouring passenger’s cold indirectly through my foolishly mask-less family.) Still felt bad about it, though.

Tags:

#illness tw #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #the more you know

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

unpretty:

i’m just gonna post all the ways i’ve found so far to get RSS Links They Don’t Want You To Know About from social media sites, because people keep Leaving Tumblr Forever in favor of sites that i’m not going to use

(if you don’t have an rss reader yet just make a feedly account, it takes about one whole minute, if you decide to use a different reader later you can export your whole list, it’s fine)

i’m gonna use strikethrough to indicate the text you need to replace and also include examples of feeds that seem to work

A General Rule

on almost any website look for the icon that looks like this

that’s the button that means ‘the rss feed is here’

Tumblr

just add /rss to the end of literally any blog’s url, including tags

i.e. unpretty.tumblr.com/rss or unpretty.tumblr.com/tagged/original/rss

now you can Leave Tumblr Forever and still follow blogs until such a time as tumblr implodes in earnest

Dreamwidth

use username.dreamwidth.org/data/rss 

i.e. gallusrostromegalus.dreamwidth.org/data/rss

WordPress

if it’s hosted on WordPress.com, just add /feed to the end of the url

if it’s self-hosted (i think around 20% of people who have their own website use wordpress to host it, i know i do bc it’s easy as sin) also just add /feed to the end the url

i.e. en.blog.wordpress.com/feed or kittyunpretty.com/feed

ArtStation

use username.artstation.com/rss

i.e. beccahallstedt.artstation.com/rss

Mastodon

just add .rss to the end of someone’s profile url

i.e. cybre.space/@kittyunpretty.rss

deviantART

use backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml?q=gallery%3Ausername 

i.e. backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml?q=gallery%3Aarvalis

YouTube

this one’s a goddamn pain in the dick because you need to find the channel id first

in general youtube channels have a nonsense url like youtube.com/channel/abunchofbullshit

you have to take that last bit and plug it into youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=abunchofbullshit

i.e. youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCbpMy0Fg74eXXkvxJrtEn3w

Tapas

this is mostly handy for webcomics that were hosting on tumblr and crossposting, i think? i don’t know how tapas works for creators tbqh. anyway they’ve actually got a button at the top when you go to the comic page.

the one between ‘add to library’ and the paper airplane will give you the rss feed

LINE Webtoons

ditto wrt tumblr-hosted webcomics, and also having a button

the button to the left of the one that says +subscribe will get you the rss feed

Twitter & Instagram

these are the only two sites i’m including that don’t have native rss support, just because so goddamn many people have literally no other web presence at all for some reason

twitter used to have rss feeds but killed them, and i don’t think instagram ever had them. you have to use workarounds for these, and a lot of them end up getting killed, like TwitRSS.me. fetchrss seems to work okay but it costs money. if you pay for inoreader they’ve got built-in support for following twitter accounts but that’s not a practical solution for most people.

right now i use rsshub.app/platform/user/username

i.e. rsshub.app/twitter/user/dasharez0ne

… but the instagram one doesn’t actually seem to work, like, most of the time. i don’t know if i’ve found one that works ever. if you’re jumping ship there please consider doing the world the enormous goddamn favor of just making a free wordpress.com account and cross-posting all your instas with ifttt or something, rather than being totally at the mercy of mark zuckerberg

Tags:

#The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #the more you know #(I use CommaFeed myself) #((and yes I keep an updated export file on hand)) #((I *used* to use Google Reader))

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

So much adulting today.

—

Got up a bit early for an appointment at the doctor’s office, because starting a few months ago most of my menstrual periods have been significantly worse than usual, and after the 2.5th bout of debilitating dizziness (the .5 was a time where it felt like it was *going* to happen but never quite got bad enough that I couldn’t stand up) I figured there was enough of a pattern developing here that I shouldn’t bet on it going away on its own.

The first-line treatment is daily iron supplements, plus two naproxen twice a day around the onset of menstruation (apparently, in addition to the painkilling effect, higher-dose naproxen can also make periods lighter). If the OTC stuff doesn’t cut it, the next step is to “”sample”“ some birth control pills. (She is one of those doctors who, when possible, keep their poorer patients supplied with enough ”“samples”“ of a medication that they never actually have to spend money on it.)

—

Then my brother and I went to the bank and signed up for index-fund RRSPs [link]. It’s not so much that I’m planning for retirement per se (though my brother might be thinking of it that way, I’m not sure), but after many hours of very stressful research regarding which forms of investment fall in the intersection of “non-awful returns”, “low fees”, and “won’t piss off the IRS [link]”, this is the only entry that I am sufficiently confident is on that list.

(I came scarily close to buying some non-RRSP index funds this autumn–even set up the account for it!–and only found out that doing so would incur the IRS’s wrath because my brother mentioned he was thinking of getting a TFSA, and this inspired me to read the Wikipedia article on them [link] (they are also terrible, for some of the same reasons). Thank you for telling me this extremely important information, Wikipedia, because nobody *else* fucking did!)

It looks like we are allowed to have *some* ETFs [link] under *some* circumstances, but I don’t have a clear sense of which ETFs/circumstances those are. Once we’ve reached a point in our lives where [18% of all the post-immigration income we’ve ever had] isn’t enough room to keep our savings in, we will have to find an appropriate specialist to consult about exactly how to tell when an ETF is permissible.

Tags:

#sometimes I wonder if I should go into U.S. tax preparation so maybe one day I can actually fucking understand what my own taxes are doing #but I think I’d rather do something more in the realm of bookkeeping or cost-benefit analysis #this stuff does not seem to *quite* be my style #but it’s even less everyone else’s style so I took the research upon myself #(at least I get to cost-benefit-analyse the various types of investment?) #adventures in human capitalism #oh look an original post #home of the brave #our home and cherished land #medical cw #menstruation #the more you know

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

Did you know that when writing a post, you can rearrange the order of the post’s tags by dragging them?

I just realised this, and it looks very helpful for fixing typos in tag rambles: just write a corrected version of the tag and drag it into place.

(though I might still continue writing my longer tag rambles out in a notepad window and then pasting them in)

Tags:

#Tumblr: a User’s Guide #oh look an original post #the first two tags on this post were originally in the opposite order #just because I could #the more you know