deathmtn

I came across the best animated gif of all time in a Wirecutter bidet review.

I've been thinking about bidets because of all of the toilet paper hoarding/shortage talk lately. Specifically, I was wondering: is there a way to use a bidet without toilet paper?

Looks like no. But possibly, you can use less toilet paper than you would without it? Bidet users, email me the truth! deathmtn@fastmail.com

Also, I'm wonder if there are other ways to effectively clean poo off one's butt. I have a friend who uses a handkerchief instead of using disposable tissue paper. Is there a (safe) analogue for the toilet?

Blue Hills social distancing report: Mostly good, except at the summit of the Great Blue Hill, which had tons of people, most of which did not give a fuck, especially the clusters of college students.

I guess confit chicken has a powerful smell. Bonus Cat reached into the fridge as soon as I opened it.

Also, weird stuff happens when you shake up lime juice.

So, I did this. It took 45 minutes to either wash all of our produce with soap and water or wipe down packaged goods with diluted bleach water. Washing fruit with soap and water feels insane.

And of course, I have no idea if it matters. If only our government had fucking prepared for this and had enough testing kits like Korea did, we could have some idea of how prevalent the coronavirus is here and take appropriate measures. But we don't, so here we are, trying to head off the worst case.

Re: Bandcamp's promotion today in which they're giving all of the revenue to the artists: Here's a few of my recommendations:

If you are interested in dungeon synth, I highly recommend you check out and buy Chaucerian Myth's Canterbury Tales, a classic of the genre. It is not available on other music streaming services.

Carpenter Brut's Trilogy is a good cinematic synthwave album.

If you like death metal, the new Blood Incantation is incredible. Great riffs, really uninhibited arrangements.

Occulting Disk by Deathprod. It's nominally electronic ambient music, but it's not accommodating. It's monumental.

Then, there's Fumio Miyashita who intended his music to have healing properties. While he may have failed to break the limitations of science there, he did create really good ambient music that does in fact feel pretty good.

I think Bandcamp is straining under some heavy traffic right now, but you should check in and buy something at some point today. 100% of albums bought today will go to the artists; Bandcamp are forgoing their cut.

I found a sealed pair of rubber gloves under the kitchen sink. Finding an item that provides minor protection from danger in the outside world feels incredibly video game-like.

Single set of 12. I gotta exercise my legs again someday.

Posted this elsewhere, realized it should be here:

I just finished reading Exhalation by Ted Chiang. He's a sci-fi author, and it's his latest collection of short stories.

Every single one of the stories was good. The big novella in it, the Lifecycle of Software Objects, was about extremely sophisticated virtual pets. It vigorously explored what might happen if they exists, and as a result, it got disturbing. But I didn't feel any Black Mirror-style "sticking it to the audience" jabs; it all seemed fair.

Most of the stories were about some sort of difficult situation created by technology or the uncovering of truths, and they all had the effect of getting me to view my own life in a slightly different way.

I also finished Why Architecture Matters by Paul Goldberger ($2 at Goodwill!). There was nothing revelatory for me, but it did help me get a big picture view of architectural history. My big takeaway is that aesthetic aspects of architecture matter nearly as much as the ergonomic aspects because of their unceasing ambient effect on people. I kinda knew that, but it's one of those concepts that greatly benefits from explicit statement.

Single set of 13. It's been a day.

One cost of moving out of Gmail so that Google isn't learning shit about you to use against you and others in harmful ways is that you no longer (probably) have infinite storage.

So, you have to have a mail client periodically download your mail so you don't run out of space on your mail service. Because I want this to all be automated and searchable, I ended up installing offlineimap, mutt, and notmuch on my Raspberry Pi, then scheduling downloads and indexing.

Though, now that I think about it, maybe I should have just searched harder initially for a mail service with lots of storage? Oh, well. I'm happy with Fastmail otherwise.

A White Nationalist Has Rebranded Himself as Coronavirus Expert. And People Are Flocking to Him.

A White Nationalist Has Rebranded Himself as Coronavirus Expert. And People Are Flocking to Him.

Where there's fear, there's opportunity for Nazis.