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k I guess twitter is good sometimes

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Ahem: AO3 needs an anonymous like button that doesn't involve logging out or opening the current page in an incognito window first because it will deadass tie your kudos to your username on publicly googleable pages and when you discover this fact years later it will not allow you to un-kudos something to hide that shit even if you've accidentally started using the same username in meatspaces and don't want local Pokemon Go players knowing your kinks.

'ao3 needs a like and dislike button'

what you need, my algorithm-rotten minded friend, is a grip

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sometimes it's not your circus and they're not your monkeys but you ARE friends with the clowns. you know?

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@elodieunderglass today on the way home from getting groceries i saw a field of many black cows and a single white cow, and thought of you and the leucism channel

(we were going too fast to take a picture)

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An aesthetic that first appears to be pure and basic Heterosexuals Are At It Again, but becomes increasingly uncomfortable until you finally understand:

these babygrows (onesies) with parental professions on eBay.

An entrepreneurial sort, eBay user “justtheshirt” realized that for some people, the perfect gift for, say, the baby of a beekeeper is a onesie saying “Daddy’s Little Beekeeper.” In fact, the more obscure the profession, the more excited the customer will feel about the representation! So they took a list of All the Professions, and generated a listing for each one. If someone buys a onesie, they can stamp it with whatever the listing said - and make a rather enormous profit, on a £3 onesie, having made exactly one design and used one script. Genius!

The issue is, they didn’t curate the list. Not a single human appears to have overseen this process. So they have inadvertently created some uncomfortably themed babywear, like “Daddy’s Little Maid,” “Daddy’s Little Nightwalker,” and “Daddy’s Little Courtesan.”

The database also contained a massive proportion of obscure Medieval English professions, like “fulker” and “meader” and “whipcord maker.” (The auto-generated listing enthuses something like, “the perfect gift for a whipcord maker - or just for someone who wishes they were one!”)

There are onesies for babies whose daddies are herbalists, muleteers and sacristans.

I have come full circle in my feelings about this and now I am all in favor of dressing babies in these, as long as the profession is incredibly obscure, and the daddy in question refuses to explain anything.

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In the meantime I discovered that yesterday, in Rome, this happened

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reddit is having a glitch where it puts the wrong captions over photos and it’s the only thing i care about right now

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Just watched the episode of X-Files where Scully is studying a striated chunk of metal removed from the sinus cavity of a possible alien abductee. The FBI's equipment isn't good enough, so she goes to a grocery store and scans the chunk of metal at a bar code scanner when nobody's looking, and the cash register starts beeping erratically and displaying weird glyphs.

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Something to watch for, which I learned from stage magic but which is extremely relevant to detecting scams as well:

The magician or scammer will *tell you* how he is going to prove his honesty.

The magician rifles through the deck until you say "stop", then he says, "Are you sure? I'll keep going if you want." and asks "Now, you agree that you could have stopped anywhere you wanted, so there's absolutely no way I could know which card you got" and because it's a magic show and you aren't paying close attention you didn't notice he didn't deal a card from where you stopped, he dealt the bottom card of the deck.

The magician doesn't ask you, "What would it take for you to believe this" because you might say, "I'd need you to use a sealed deck" or "I'd have to personally shuffle the deck" or some other proof that would make the trick impossible.

Magicians say "You agree that if I did *this*, it would mean *that*, right?" and you say yes, and it feels like you are the one who got to verify things, but of course the magician is lying and the proof is nothing of the kind.

Scammers do the same thing. A really concrete example is phone scammers pretending to be working for the government will say, "Look, I see you're skeptical if I'm who I say I am, I'm going to hang up and call back, and you'll see on the caller ID it says, 'FBI' and that tells you that I'm really working for the government."

Now, caller ID can be spoofed pretty easily, so it doesn't prove anything at all.

But it *feels* to you like you demanded proof and the scammer was willing to give you the proof.

But you didn't tell the scammer what out would take to prove it to you, the scammer told you what the proof would be.

This is actually like a really basic thing to look for if you want to start decoding magic tricks and scams.

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This is how I celebrated the Ides of March last year. I don't know how to commit to the bit any more this year, but I'll take suggestions.

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sick post i just found online. sorry i couldnt find the source

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really enjoying all the videos Muslims have been posting of their cats looking like this

when the humans are up at 4 am for suhoor

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