to sleep anon

I was trying to track down a non-soundcloud version of Chords of Humanity, the song he wrote that when he was 17 was used by Doctors Without Borders, and instead found that it was used in a Fallout New Vegas mod that he may also have made at 17?

which is a sequel to another mod that's also credited to a Dylan Hollis, which I'm not necessarily assuming is him. Could have been a different Dylan Hollis who happened to have found the song by searching his name--oh, wait, there's a video of game play (with the song as background), and there's a tiny bit of voice acting...yeah, that's him.

A pun post crossed my dash, and I reblogged it with an equally bad pun in return. A couple of my followers find it funny, it's a good day for everyone.

That was on July 7th.

Virality on Reddit was entirely algorithmic. You could garner a couple crossposts, but the success of a post was entirely dependent on whether or not it hit r/all--the main page of Reddit. If your post does that, it's immediately exposed to 10x the number of people and immediately gets upvoted.

On my pun post, I get a couple reblogs. And those reblogs get a couple reblogs--nobody really adds any content to the post, it just gets a couple reblogs here and there.

There's a specific chain of reblogs that I'd like to focus on. The most popular post on this chain has about 25 reblogs on it. Half the posts have three reblogs or fewer. Five posts in this chain have just one reblog total.

But the reblog chain keeps going. And going. It breaches containment many times over. And finally, after a chain THIRTY SIX posts long, at 9:30 AM, July 22nd this morning, it hits a popular account.

99% percent of the people who have seen the post--virtually unchanged from how it left my dash--have seen it because it was curated by 36 different people. That's insane to me.

None of those 36 people know that they're part of this chain. They saw a post, reblogged it, and moved on. If any one of these people had not reblogged, the post would have a fraction of the impact it has.

And yet, after two weeks, the post has effectively hit the main page of tumblr. It was picked up, only because people liked it enough to show it to their followers. There were no algorithms necessary.

I've gone. Not one for goodbyes, I thought it best to slip out quietly. Love to you all, Giles.

I explained the delicate situation to my mom, as my sister-in-law is letting the news get out by word-of-mouth from the immediate family rather than an awkward “unsave-the-date”. My mom obviously told my own family.

May I present the best apple:

The variety of apples and the care for apple flavors is also a big reason why the non-alcoholic drink apple cider is so popular. It's a common thing for people to choose a specific brand of apple cider because they like the taste. And farmers will also sell their own apple cider in the fall.

There is also a website called Apple Search that was founded in 1999 with the goal of preserving the agricultural heritage of apple varieties and "finding lost apples." They have a complete list of the 1000+ varieties they've found; finding an apple means finding an actual original tree. Here is how to help with the search, especially if you know elderly people and can ask them about apple varieties. There are other ways to help that are listed, too, though.

And here's a couple recipes they've posted (alt text added):

[1] Technically even though the release was in 1991, it was a long process that began with initial development in the 70s and patenting in the 80s. The Honeycrisp apple was developed at the University of Minnesota. See their list of apple varieties, most recently the BigFlirt™ (2025 and the SuperSnap™ (2025) at this site: https://mnhardy.umn.edu/apples/varieties

Me: Yes, right here.

Lady: Is how much?

Me: $2.99 a pound.

Lady: It's usually $1.49.

Me: Yes, in the summer.

Lady, pauses, then grabs two: I put it in a soup.

Me: Oh nice, what kind are you making?

Lady: You will not fantasize about my soup.