The classic box fan CR-Box was invented during the
COVID-19 pandemic and is THE most cost effective
method to clean the air. They have
been shown
to be remarkably effective and outperforming most
commercial HEPA filters on the market. It can also be
scaled up as there have been many CR box builds where
entire schools came together to provide one per
classroom.
This article is legitimately helpful, but I'm mostly posting
it because I find it extremely amusing that (at least as of a
year ago) the best-in-class air filter by cost and among the
best overall is literally just taping a bunch of filters to a
box fan yourself. Hilarious and easy on your wallet!
But what's even funnier is Joey's #1 recommendation:
The PC fan CR box was a recent invention to find a
method to achieve high clean air delivery rates with
very low noise. Noise is the greatest limitation of
in-room air cleaners and PC fans are the best option
to address it. There are no other air cleaners on the
market that have the capability to supply 150 lps of
clean air at 35 dBA.
Nothing comes close.
The only thing better than than taping a bunch of filters to a
box fan? Taping them to a bunch of PC fans instead! Granted
the ones linked here are a little more sophisticated
than that, but elsewhere on his site Joey presents one that
absolutely is just fans and tape:
spoilers for
She Loves to Cook, & She Loves to Eat
Yuki: 😭 I can't believe you're moving
further away than literally the same apartment complex! This
is the worst thing that's ever happened to me! Totoko: 😐💭 I wonder if she likes me. I
wonder if she even likes women. No way to know. Yuki: I just... I like you so much!!! Totoko: 💭 Just no way to know.
A lot of my friends don't like star ratings for media, and I
get it. It's inherently reductive, boiling down your complex
and contextual mental-emotional response to a single linear
scale that's often taken to approximate some absolute notion
of "quality" that probably doesn't even exist in the first
place. That's why I always make sure to write down actual
textual thoughts about everything I review—to have a place to
capture the nuance and context that's never going to be
visible in a star rating.
At the same time, I always enjoy the intellectual exercise of
comparing very different things across the same lines. Back in
the day I did yearly "Natto Awards" among all the media I'd
journaled that year, and I'd always have a lot of fun doing
cross-media categories like "best horror" where movies, video
games, and novels were all in competition with one another.
It's not particularly fair as a way of determining
quality, but that hardly matters when quality is fake anyway.
What it does do is get you thinking about what it means to
successfully inhabit a genre across media, and what each
medium brings to its takes on the same ideas. I find star
ratings do something similar, pushing me to really think about
how much I appreciate a film or video game and to try to
articulate why.
By far the biggest reason I use them all the time, though, is
just that my memory for these things is awful. My subconscious
is particularly liable to just toss out memories it deems
"irrelevant" by its own mysterious criteria, and it turns out
that what I thought of a given film—or even whether I saw it
at all—is roundly considered irrelevant. But not to my
conscious mind! I actually care a lot about being able to
remember how much I enjoyed something long after the fact, and
star ratings are a major way I do that.
To that end, I also try to keep a pretty consistent rubric of
what each rating means, so I don't shift too much over time. I
do inevitably move somewhat and have to self-correct, of
course. This post was itself inspired by me realizing that
I've been giving out
★★★½ and to a
lesser extent
★★★★ ratings
too eagerly. So, as much as a reminder to myself as anything,
here's my schema. It's presented as whole-star tiers only;
I'll add a half-star if it's particularly enjoyable or
well-made relative to its tier.
★ :
Corresponds to the "#bad" tag on my old media journal.
Actively poorly-made, offensive, and/or otherwise
miserable, either with minimal redeeming qualities or
simply irredeemably noxious.
★★ :
Corresponds to the "#eh" tag on my old media journal. Did
not vibe with me. Nothing is egregiously wrong, but
nothing is outstandingly right either. Alternatively,
there are things I liked about it but somewhat more things
I disliked.
★★★ :
Corresponds to the "#good" tag on my old media journal.
Solidly enjoyable. Not a barn-burner,…
On July 18th, I documented my Low% route, including a
discovery I'd made. It is possible to
snipe Hedges 2
while standing on the top of the mountain. The
description of the trick included the following
picture and caption:
The panel is completely invisible because it is
blocked by the castle wall -- however, the wall
has no collision so the panel is still solvable.
This statement is false.
It was an understandable assumption to make. There's
no reason why that wall needed to have collision coded
into it, since it wouldn't be occluding anything in
normal gameplay. It's common for game developers to
cut corners in places that don't really matter. But it
remains an incorrect assumption.
I don't do speedrunning myself, but I find the act fascinating
and delightful to watch and especially to learn about. There's
an intrinsic human drive, distributed across the entire
species, to fractally explore every aspect of the world we
live in. It's what drives us to do science, it's what drives
us to understand mathematical structures, and it's at least a
part of why art speaks to us as strongly as it does. I find
speedrunning to be a particularly pure expression of this
drive, the progression from enjoying something to wanting to
enjoy it to its fullest to diving so deep into it that it
expands into a world of its own.
Hatkirby's writeup of the process of discovery and the fallout
of one particular trick in The Witness is fascinating
and at times hilarious. I recommend giving it a look if only
to discover why specifically it's called the "No-Wizzies
Snipe". I bet you won't be able to guess.
i've come around 360 to thinking that silent hill 2 is
underrated actually but only because i haven't seen
enough people talk about the parallelism between sh2's
crowleyan psychologizing of sh1's necromantic horror on
one hand and the homologous relationship between
contemporary occultism and its demonological
predecessors on the other
people always talk about "old souls" but it's way funnier when
people have mismatched young souls. like I've met
seven-year-olds who are spiritually twenty-two. still an
absolute idiot child but not in the way you'd expect at all
I keep bringing up "Webmentions" in the context of discussing
the sociable web and
advocating for more people to adopt more social technologies
on their websites, but I always run into a wall: there's no
good place to link people to so they can understand more about
what that means. All the existing explanations I've found are
deep in the weeds of how Webmentions work on a
technical level, which isn't a very helpful place to start for
people who just want to post.
I want to fill that gap with this post, and give people who
don't know the ins and outs of HTTP a working understanding of
what Webmentions do and how to get them up and
running for your site. To that end:
Webmentions are a way to let a website know that you linked
to it.
That's it! At it's core, it's just that simple. If a website
supports Webmentions, you tell it "Hey, here's the URL of a
page with a link to you", it double-checks that the link
actually exists, and then it does what it pleases with that
information.
What can you do with Webmentions?
Notifications
The simplest thing you can do is just look at the Webmentions
you receive like a notifications feed on a social media site,
and appreciate that people like what you're up to. I get all
my Webmentions delivered to me as an RSS feed (more on that
below), and I'll always check out the links to see what people
are saying.
My Webmention notification feed on webmention.io
In addition to being the easiest to set up, I think this is
actually the most useful thing to do with Webmentions. Having
a way to see when people reply to your posts makes
conversation
possible and seeing people's appreciation encourages
performance.
Even if you never go beyond using Webmentions as pure
notifications, it's a great way to become more interconnected.
Replies as comments
If someone makes a post on their blog that's replying to yours
and sends you a Webmention, you can display that reply like a
comment underneath your post. This is pretty common for
out-of-the-box Webmention plugins, like
this one for WordPress[1]. You can see it in action on
Liz's WordPress blog where
my reply on this blog
shows up
as a comment on hers, with my avatar and the original posting date and
everything.
My post replying to Liz
My post as a reply on Liz's blog
Making this work nicely requires a bit of setup on the part of
the page that contains the link, though. A computer isn't
smart enough to take any old webpage and figure out which
parts of it are the author's name, the author's avatar, the
text of the reply, and so on. In order for all of that to work
nicely, the linking page needs to use
h-entry metadata
to explicitly indicate all this information. Fair warning:
h-entry is unavoidably a bit technical
to…
my festive cocktail… I promise it’s actually
delicious (recipe at the bottom)
(cw: talk about death [specifically mine,
theoretically])
As of today I have (officially) stayed alive with Type
1 diabetes for ten years1. I’ve done a little bit of reading on the history of
Type 1 treatment, one of the first acute conditions
turned chronic through medical intervention (thank
you, Drs. Banting, Macleod, and Best). The longer I
live, the more “I would have died by now” milestones I
pass, and the more I am reminded of how grateful I am
for advances in diabetes treatment. I have passed the
“I would have lived this long on a starvation diet”
milestone. In a few years, I’ll probably make it past
the “lethal atherosclerosis” line, then the “renal
failure” line, assuming I retain access to current
diabetes and other medical technology2. I’ll probably also mostly avoid the non-lethal
sequelae, the blindness and the amputations and the
peripheral neuropathies. Apparently in a few years
I’ll need to start taking statins even if my
cholesterol is good, because diabetes often brings
vascular complications. As good as diabetes technology
is, I am, fundamentally, manually running one of the
primary metabolic loops in the human body. It’s
decidedly imperfect even when running at top
performance.
It's really tough for me to read this post which is, to a
substantial degree, about the hypothetical of my wife dying.
But I think it's worth sharing both as a celebration of the
fact that she is very much alive and as a meditation on what
life is like with only the ongoing application of modern
medical treatment between oneself and the void.
Also, I gotta say, I am pretty proud of that
beverage. The flavors meld really well—I wanted to make sure
the black sesame was still very much the primary note, which
it absolutely is, while giving it a bit of richness with the
scotch and cacao as well as a touch of liveliness with the
amaretto and absinthe. I might actually seek out more black
sesame ice cream to be able to make this for friends.
I have formed the opinion that Silent Hill 2's
"health drink" is an unflavored yogurt/raw quinoa smoothie
with no other ingredients and I will not be swayed from this
