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:
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.
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.
The founders of the GLF intentionally echoed the
rhetoric of Black Power (“power to the people”) and of
North Vietnamese resistance (“liberation front”) to
Western imperialism, even as they called out other
“oppressed groups” for discriminating against queer
people rather than finding solidarity with them.
Visibility was a radical proposition for queer
Americans in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In
encouraging people to “come out,” the GLF advocated
for the transformation of a culture that not only
presumed heterosexuality but too often forced queer
people to conform.
I pass for cisgender perhaps 75% of the time. I have
very good health insurance through my union, and in
the near future I could get facial feminization
surgery. I would easily pass and could go stealth and
assimilate into heterosexuality. I could be
inoffensive and demure, only quietly transsexual when
relevant, and distance myself from the trans community
that has supported me to where I am in my life today.
My unusually high number of gay male friends could be
attributed to being a faghag beloved by GBFs like I'm
Grace of the eponymous Will & Grace. I
could rename my blog to "The Millennial Chofetz Chaim"
and edit and delete every post about being trans. I
could make myself someone appealing to the lowest
common denominator of men.
But is rejection of who I am really the path to
happiness? Is the love of a man worth more than the
gift I have been given by HaShem of being transsexual?
This post is by now a bit late for National Coming Out Day,
but I did enjoy Dr. Davis's history of its observance and the
political background of the concept of "coming out" and I
particularly appreciated Shel's additions. She
considers her experience specifically as a straight trans
woman, the value of being out to her, and its value to the
community. It feels a little silly to repost a link roundup,
but this is definitely one worth reading!
A pickup truck with the Delta airlines logo on
the side, bedecked with rainbows and topped with
an inflatable Delta plane. Several men are
visible in the truck bed grinning and looking
off to the side.
“Smile,” Tom reminded me. “You’re going to be famous.”
I looked up and saw people holding up their phones,
filming us. “No…” I gasped. “…not on social media!
We’ll be taken out of context!”
“The context, darling, is that everyone on 4chan and
Twitter is going to know that you’re my little bitch
boy.”
“It’s X now,” I grunted, and this time when he pounded
into me so hard it felt like I couldn’t breathe, I
deserved it.
Cliff's written a viciously funny piece of satirical erotic
fiction sending up the discourse around the place of sexuality
at pride. It's funny and it's hot and you should for sure
check it out if that's your jam. I think if more entries in
internet arguments were in the form of erotic fiction rather
than angry microposts the world would be a much better place.
when i was younger, i was honestly pretty
disinterested in makeup and fashion trends. i found it
alienating; i did not fit in with what was popular
among the youth of my assigned gender. and i think i
knew that it was a futile effort to even attempt
fitting in. no, i knew i was a little weirdo who felt
infinitely more comfortable hiding behind a computer
screen.
but there was one day where i was at the local
drugstore, and i made a shortcut through the makeup
section to get to the pharmacy. something caught my
eye. it was a display of eyeshadow quads, all
featuring different color palettes. and i stopped for
a moment, curious about the color combinations. color
theory was already a pretty big interest of mine at
that point; i had been doing a ton of limited color
palette drawing exercises, and the quads on display
reminded me of the palettes i'd use for practice.
I really appreciate tulip's articulation of their approach to
makeup as an art rather than an attempt to meet impossible
beauty standards. I'm always compelled by ways to consciously
produce art in places that aren't generally thought of as
sites for art, and tulip has a particularly interesting
perspective coming to makeup from a painting background. I
haven't worn anything beyond lipstick and the occasional
eyeliner in years, but this has inspired me to consider
breaking out the eyeshadow palette again...
This structure does not inherently preclude a sincere
or substantive engagement with 9/11–it’s entirely
normal for comedy to use its final reveal for brutal
effect—a stunned, awkward laugh that makes use of the
shock of a perspective shift. But that’s not what’s
going on here. The revelation that Snuffy has been
talking about 9/11 does not provide any incisive
commentary on what has gone before—it is simply a
sudden intrusion of grief into a context that had done
little to suggest such a thing was coming.
Is this supposed to be funny? Certainly it in practice
is funny, in that the strip is a ridiculous absurd
thing. But this is a humor of bathos—one in which we
laugh at the strip instead of with it. Indeed, it is
funny only to the precise degree that it isn’t
supposed to be. If the strip is read as insincere,
with its punchline meant to be funny then it becomes a
cruel and ghoulish thing. What is funny about it is
its misapplied sincerity—the fact that it genuinely
appears to be engaging in an act of public mourning
and is getting it wrong, instead ending up weirdly and
dissonantly tone deaf.
When I wasn't in high school, one of the most compelling
English class assignments I ever got was to find an ad from a
newspaper or magazine and do a close critical reading of it to
develop a deeper understanding of the cultural context in
which that ad was created, what its specific goals were, and
how it aimed to achieve them. It was a blast, and one of the
most influential projects for me in developing my critical eye
towards the world around me.
In this post, Elizabeth Sandifer turns the same close reading
techniques towards the installment of the newspaper comic
Barney Google and Snuffy Smith published on the
ten-year anniversary of 9/11, which takes a particularly
bizarre approach to commemorating the event. 9/11 is already a
notably strange cultural touchstone in the US, and so coming
at it from such an odd angle suits the subject perfectly.
This was the last community space where I felt fully
included. This was the last community space where I
could meet a new person by chance, and not have my
mask be a social barrier. In other community spaces,
people do not try to socialize with me. Unmasked
people avoid me so long as I am wearing a mask. I have
conducted experiments. During times of
low-transmission, I have experimented with taking my
mask off in community events where people previously
had ignored me despite my generally outgoing
personality. Suddenly, everyone becomes very
interested in talking to me. People welcome me to the
space as if I am new. I tell people that we had
actually met before—multiple times, in this same
space. They ask where I had been this whole time. I
tell them, right here, the whole time, wearing a mask.
At the next event, I will put my mask back on, and
those same people will go back to ignoring me when I
greet them by name. Kol Tzedek was the only space
where this was not an issue, because everyone was
wearing a mask.
[...]
I wish we could have negotiated. I wish we could have
agreed to compromises. I wish it was not just a
venting session where fifty disabled people cried in
our own ways and a middle-aged cis woman took notes
with a blank facial expression. I remember at one
point, she asked me why I do not simply attend virtual
services. I am grateful for the existence of virtual
services in this world, but to suggest that they are
comparable to an in-person community space is a joke.
If virtual services were just as good as in-person
services, then why don't the able-bodied people just
attend virtual services? Why did I donate hundreds of
dollars to fundraise for an expensive new
ADA-compliant building for the synagogue? Why would I
give 5% of my annual income to a local synagogue just
to attend virtual services? There are plenty of free
online options I could have gone to instead.
Shel's essay about her former synagogue rescinding their mask
requirement for services and in doing so effectively barring
their disabled community members from full participation is
painful to read, but it's also one of the best articulations
I've seen of the grief and alienation of being disabled[1]
during a pandemic. This experience is particular to the Jewish
community in Philadelphia, but at the same time it is one of a
pattern of moral failures that have been happening since the
pandemic began and people en masse started facing the
immediate question: are you willing to sacrifice your comfort
to give other people space to exist?
This is a rawly emotional post that slides towards despair at
the end, and I do want to put back on that. I don't at all
blame Shel for feeling that…
I think most people stabilized their warped sense
of time by other means. Instead of accepting that
the pandemic continued on, that we failed to contain
it and so would need to incorporate its ongoing
reality into the stories we tell ourselves about our
own lives, they instead transformed the fantasy of after into their reality. After the pandemic, after the lockdowns, after
our world ruptured. They were able to interrupt the
prolonged uncertainty that the pandemic had brought
to all of our lives by erecting a finish line just
in time for them to run through it. And as they ran
through it, celebrating the fictional end of an
arduous journey, they simultaneously invented a new before. This is the invention of memory.
The Pandemic became something temporally contained,
its crisp boundaries providing a psychic safeguard to
any lingering anxieties around the vulnerability and
interdependence of our bodies that only a virus could
show us. No longer did it threaten to erupt in their
everyday lives, forcing cancellations and illnesses
and deaths. It was, officially, part of The Past. And
from the safety of hindsight (even if only an
illusion), people began telling and re-telling the
story of The Pandemic in ways that strayed from how it
all actually went down. It was a way to use memory as
self-soothing.
This is an intense, touching piece on the way people's minds
have been shaped by the pandemic, and the way that shape is in
turn determined by their—our—failure en masse to
handle the reality of the pandemic. It's another way of
looking at the same issues I was driving at in
COVID Denialism and Disability Justice, and I similarly found it helpful to bring myself some calm
(if not closure) to the pain of seeing people act so
heartlessly.
