#it was datestamped to 2022

[bitegore]

okay i am actually writing the Experimentalist First Aid metapost right now.

Beginning statement and caveats - I have no reason to believe this is canon and basically don't, except that I like it better. However, it literally would be indistinguishable from canon for the most part for various reasons outlined below, so like, you can't prove it's not. Canon compliant canon divergent headcanon territory.

Also, this is about G1.

I think First Aid is many things.

First Aid is a big giant fucking baby and he has the experience of someone who has been alive for Ten Total Minutes. First Aid is not old enough to have properly-tuned self-preservation instincts or an understanding of what will and will not be able to kill him. Unlike everyone else, he handles this by being a giant soft baby (affectionate) and going "I don't want to go fuck around with things that can kill me" and hangs out inside, where he gets his fill of Necessary Exciting Stuff(tm) with Ratchet and the other Autobots. However, he's still got the ravenous desire for Experiences, and this turns into

He fucking loves learning. he loves learning so much. He doesn't want to get hurt but he wants to know everything. Sometimes he needs to go out and do stupid things for that, but he'd rather learn from someone else's experiences first.

He is a medic. He likes to help people, but he likes to help people by taking them apart and getting elbow-deep inside of them and rearranging things, which is usually the kind of thing that human people get squeamish about. Even granting that Transformers are not as squeamish or flinchy about gore as humans are, being the person who gets to watch their friends get grievously injured and then stick your hands in there and mess around with the wound is pretty heavy for some (most!) people! But I think it would be a strange reading to say that First Aid doesn't like to be a medic, so this clearly doesn't bother him the way it might bother someone else. He doesn't like when his friends are injured, but the actual process of surgery - cutting them open or digging into a wound to clean it out, that sort of thing - isn't a problem for him, which leads into

Even by TF standards, First Aid is remarkably unfazed by injuries, gore, and insides-currently-outside than someone else his age would probably be. And that means I can get away with the next few parts...

I read First Aid as a sadist. In the autonomous, just-kind-of-happens sort of way, not the "I'm going to menace you" sort of way people sometimes interpret that statement. People get hurt in front of First Aid and he finds himself fascinated by the injury and immediately concerned with fussing over them in particular, partially because it's his job to pay attention to the wound and partially because there's something about pain and injuries that fascinates him beyond the confines of his job.

First Aid also likes his job, and he likes doing a good job, which means he's not aout to just start banging anyone up to hurt them for the hell of it because his job is to fix them. I don't even imagine sadism is particularly uncommon among doctors, because frankly it only makes sense to me that the characters literally hardwired to cut people open might have something making it so they don't feel bad when they cut someone open. Which would mean it has to be easy for them to maintain an Autobot standard of professionalism, which doesn't really prohibit being buddies with your patients (see: Ratchet) or, like, certain human standards of care around privacy and freedom from experimentation, but does broadly prohibit being needlessly cruel to your patients in a way they themselves aren't on board with. So this doesn't interfere with his job at all, basically; it's just some extra thing he has on the side for the most part.

First Aid is a big giant fucking baby and he has the experience of someone who has been alive for Ten Total Minutes. First Aid is not old enough to have properly-tuned self-preservation instincts or an understanding of what will and will not be able to kill him. Unlike everyone else, he handles this by being a giant soft baby (affectionate) and going "I don't want to go fuck around with things that can kill me" and hangs out inside, where he gets his fill of Necessary Exciting Stuff(tm) with Ratchet and the other Autobots. However, he's still got the ravenous desire for Experiences, and this turns into

He fucking loves learning. he loves learning so much. He doesn't want to get hurt but he wants to know everything. Sometimes he needs to go out and do stupid things for that, but he'd rather learn from someone else's experiences first.

He is a medic. He likes to help people, but he likes to help people by taking them apart and getting elbow-deep inside of them and rearranging thigns, which is usually the kind of thing that human people get squeamish about. Even granting that Transformers are not as squeamish or flinchy about gore as humans are, being the person who gets to watch their friends get grievously injured and then stick your hands in there and mess around with the wound is pretty heavy for some (most!) people! But I think it would be a strange reading to say that First Aid doesn't like to be a medic, so this clearly doesn't bother him the way it might bother someone else. He doesn't like when his friends are injured, but the actual process of surgery - cutting them open or digging into a wound to clean it out, that sort of thing - isn't a problem for him, which leads into

Even by TF standards, First Aid is remarkably unfazed by injuries, gore, and insides-currently-outside than someone else his age would probably be. And that means I can get away with the next few parts...

I read First Aid as a sadist. In the autonomous, just-kind-of-happens sort of way, not the "I'm going to menace you" sort of way people sometimes interpret that statement. People get hurt in front of First Aid and he finds himself fascinated by the injury and immediately concerned with fussing over them in particular, partially because it's his job to pay attention to the wound and partially because there's something about pain and injuries that fascinates him beyond the confines of his job.

First Aid also likes his job, and he likes doing a good job, which means he's not aout to just start banging anyone up to hurt them for the hell of it because his job is to fix them. I don't even imagine sadism is particularly uncommon among doctors, because frankly it only makes sense to me that the characters literally hardwired to cut people open might have something making it so they don't feel bad when they cut someone open. Which would mean it has to be easy for them to maintain an Autobot standard of professionalism, which doesn't really prohibit being buddies with your patients (see: Ratchet) or, like, certain human standards of care around privacy and freedom from experimentation, but does broadly prohibit being needlessly cruel to your patients in a way they themselves aren't on board with. So this doesn't interfere with his job at all, basically; it's just some extra thing he has on the side for the most part.

I think that's all the requisite readings.

In sum, this gives us a guy who relaly likes being around people in pain, who also likes being the guy to help them out of it, and likes to learn. He's encouraged to do all of these things by the people around him, because he's not being concerning about any of it- he's just dedicated to what he does and he's good at it, and getting better every day.

And by the same tokens, you have a guy who really, really badly wants to get to take someone apart over and over, because he wants to see how they work on the insides and he likes the way they look when they're in pain, but he doesn't want to fuck over his friends, comrades, patients, or teammates, and everyone he's interacting with is at least three of those things.

Plus we get G1 First Aid's pacifism, which is a strongly-held ideological standpoint that First Aid maintains - he won't fight, he won't carry weapons, but he will work as a medic. We can interpret that this isn't a squeamishness issue for him by the asme tokens I established earlier - that he's much more okay with getting into the guts of his friends and coworkers than the average person would be - and also by the fact that he was built in a military context and everyone else is a military fighter of some sort. if he were reluctant to hurt people because of anything shy of serious personal convictions, I am convinced that the Autobots around him could have convinced him otherwise. His position is profoundly difficult to maintain in an active war zone, aftr all.

So even beyond standard Autobot ethics, First Aid does not want to hurt people. Yet I reconcile this with saying he is an innate sadist anyway, because they're not mutually exclusive. It really just means that, like, First Aid can want to take people apart all he likes; he's just not going to do it to anyone until someone asks him to.

As an aside, in my corner of fandom anyway, it seems like we talk a lot about characters who kind of throw interpersonal concerns and care for those around them to the wind in order to chase their own hedonistic desires (see: Vortex, Overlord, Motormaster, Megatron, etc) or otherwise, put bluntly, just kind of don't care that much about their partners' and playthings' consent even when they have it. And that can be a lot of fun, obviously; I like them. But as of late my friends who shoot the shit with me about consensual kink in Transformers have been busy or we haven't been talking about it for a while, and I've been missing the other side - the exact same desires and interests, just harnessed, controlled, and managed, not because First Aid has to but because he just, like... feels like it. It's what he wants to do. And, like. yeah the Autobots wouldn't be pleased if he turned out to be some sort of turborapist, lol, but he's the first person to decide he's not going to run around doing harm. I tie it into the pacifism. Part of this reading is because this is my reading; part of this reading is because I want to insert even more contrast between the characters I see First Aid Aid played alongside than I'm already seeing when I finally sit down and write about him myself.

So what this boils down to - all together - is that First Aid wants someone to ask him to take them apart.

And he likes to learn.

So the first person to catch his attention and walk him through opening their chest up is going to get to see him catch his brain on every shiny new edge he's not used to seeing outside of a medical context, and he's going to go over and catalogue every single part and take them out and put them back in and he's going to do it over and over until he can do it without looking and then he's going to do that to everything else, too. He's going to pick up every style of play fast and hard, but I read him landing hard on the "roleplay is kind of silly, I like bodies" side of domination. And I think he'd enjoy domination a lot.

He's a good student and a quick study. He likes to learn. He's enthusiastic and comfortable being taught, too. It would be very easy to turn him into a service top, too, to talk him into being an extension of your own hands and guide him through doing what you want.

But only to a point. Because he's still a pacifist, so you can't use him to hurt someone else, unless they're also asking for it. But, hell, he's part of a combiner team... I bet that would come easy to him, too, once he does have everyone's consent.

In a few thousand years, I think First Aid is going to maybe be one of the biggest kinksters in the entire Autobot faction, or he's going to have extremely narrow and extremely specific tastes. But he's going to get there through experimentation and he's going to get there through his fascination with anything new, which right now is everything.

Last bit is that - I think his instincts are not fine-tuned, self-preservation-wise. I think his social instincts are just as bad. you develop those over time, after all, and through experience, and he doesn't have that. And he's a pacifist because he doesn't want to hurt Decepticons. Very sweet, certainly, but the Decepticons are like... kind of dicks lmfao. The way of things is not very complicated because there are so few Transformers around and alive; eventually First Aid is going to run into a Decepticon. The question is if he ever ends up on good terms with someone from the other faction - or if he already has - or if he gets himself hurt early and learns to avoid them fast. But even with the latter, I don't think that's how he'll stay. I think he wants to experiment. I think he wants to learn and do more and learn more. So eventually he will run into a Decepticon who is also willing to play the way he's willing to play, and they will end up making, if not friends, then at least some sort of positive interaction and First Aid will...

...well, he's never going to stop being curious, huh. That would be boring. But his morals and standards for his behavior are either going to stay ironclad or they won't, and either way it'll be interesting to see what happens. Because there's no bottom to where First Aid might go, eventually.. as long as he's being asked for it.

[aconitewolfsbane]

I posted 1,472 times in 2022

That's 187 more posts than 2021!

13 posts created (1%)

1,459 posts reblogged (99%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@akela-nakamura

@indiigocats

@worldheritagepostorganization

@biggest-gaudiest-patronuses

@moringmark

I tagged 1,196 of my posts in 2022

Only 19% of my posts had no tags

#lmto! - 393 posts

#fanart - 302 posts

#stevenuniverse - 243 posts

#video - 204 posts

#comic - 183 posts

#feelzcure - 183 posts

#pearl - 144 posts

#world heritage post - 100 posts

#truth - 96 posts

#theowlhouse - 85 posts

Longest Tag: 74 characters

#this is the only su slander post i'll reblog because its fucking hilarious

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

Uhhhhhhh... ...

I’m... already following them?

"Hey, we see you like this user enough to follow them. Maybe you’ll also like this user?”

FYI, I’m one of those 45 notes.

Oh Tumblr. One day, your owners will learn how to program you.

1 note - Posted January 23, 2022

#4

The Owl House s3 theory

I was thinking about the ending of season 2, wondering how they were gonna get back to the Demon Realm with King’s blood or anything.

But then I realised...

Luz carved the palisman wood into an egg, because “I got to decide what my future looked like when I chose to be a witch, and I want them to have that option too. Until then, I'm willing to wait.”

However, when Luz was starting her palisman carving lesson, King asked “Are you going to carve me?”

I believe that because King put the idea into her mind as she was carving the palisman, at the beginning of season 3, possibly after a small timeskip, the egg will hatch into... a small titan, modelled after King.

King did hatch from an egg after all.

It won’t have anywhere near the level of power that King will grow to have, or even has now.

But the most important ability it will have will be the ability to open a portal between the realms.

Luz simply has to tap the palisman staff against any door, open it and step into the other realm.

This is the only way that I can see the kids being able to return to the Demon Realm in season 3.

2 notes - Posted July 3, 2022

#3

Crazy idea I’m unable to do anything with...

A business rating app, for employees.

A business has their name and address submitted with reviews from current and past employees.

Rate the business based on the wages, how you were treated whilst working there, the general work environment, ect. Also, a field to share personal horror stories of any petty firing practices or toxic work environments. And maybe a scale to display usual starting wage, hours you get paid for versus hours they expect you to work. Ratings are datestamped so you can compare older ratings to newer ones and see if they’ve gotten their shit together. And also to make sure you’re going with the most recent ratings. Maybe a filter to select only those from a certain time period so you can look at only those submitted within the past month, or whatever? With the score adjusted for that time period only.

Basically, a way for jobseekers to see if a particular place is good to work at, or if it should be avoided at all costs. Written by people who currently work there or have worked there.

A easy system to report any managers/bosses who learn the app exists and create an account to try and raise their score by giving 5 stars on everything. So if they get flagged 3 times by different users as a manager trying to protect the bottom line, their rating will be deleted so it won’t affect the true score, and their account deleted too. A similar thing for users who recognise that someone is trolling, leaving poor reviews to screw with people. 3 reports, deleted and removed.

Users have to check a box to say if they’re a current employee of the place or a past one. Past can maybe have a field to say how long ago they worked there, so people can see if it’s an older complaint compared to a possibly better later rating from later employees. They can also chose to say if they were fired or they quit.

Businesses will have to either fix the problems, or shut down because they can’t hire enough people to stay afloat. Corporate can see why a particular store isn’t doing well and send someone to fix the problem. Getting rid of a toxic manager, improving conditions, ect...

Someone trying to find a job and sees a place is hiring can check the app to see if it’s worth applying there, or if it’s actually a gate to the hell dimensions to be avoided.

Just, basically, a way for people to know how shitty a place is before they apply for a job, and to also compare experiences at different places.

Maybe called JobRate? JobScore? RateMyWork? RateThisPlace? I dunno, I’m bad at naming stuff... And I dunno if any of those names are already used for anything else. *shrug*

4 notes - Posted August 5, 2022

#2

Uhh... Okay, I guess...

Replaying Breath of the Wild, trying to beat my personal best time for a hundo.

I was going through Woodland collecting Koroks and heading towards the Tyhphlo Ruins, and I stopped to look at my bows and pick out a good one for the next challenge when I noticed something... weird.

All of my bows, including ones that I already had, had all become triple-shot ones.

I have no idea when or why this has happened. I only had two triple shots before, and now they all are. I think one I picked up after noticing this was also randomly a triple-shot.

They all look like regular single-shot bows, but looking at them with the cursor shows that they have the x3.

I can’t find anything about this online, as most are about how to clone existing multi-shot bows. Nothing about regular single shots suddenly becoming triple-shots...

I’m not complaining of course, this is awesome. But very confusing, cause I wasn’t doing anything kind of known glitch AFAIK, and this has just... happened. *shrug*

Has anybody else experienced this?

Will post video of my bow stash in a few days, once I'm done with the hundo, so you can have a look.

9 notes - Posted July 22, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

This is the most perfect thing I have ever seen.

105 notes - Posted March 29, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[kamwima]

[ID: A drawing of a cluster of fruit shaped balloons. The fruit in the cluster include strawberry, kiwi, watermelon, orange, starfruit, and dragon fruit. The background is a light purple-pink color, and above the dragonfruit balloon is the datestamp, 年2022. /End ID.]

[sirius-bizdness]

Newsletter came out, and I realized I haven't checked any of the music that's come out since my first post! Time to fix that.

There are no datestamps in the Sept 2022 update's music metadata. The website can load either .MP3 or .OGG versions of the music tracks; I checked both, and can confirm these are all clean.

The Spamton Sweepstakes has a pinkin' lot of music (and other sound assets). Of the tracks I already had downloaded, three were dated 2022: the Big Shot MIDI (midi-bigshot_byShinkoNetCavy.mp3), Noelle's uncorrupted country MIDI (midi-holiday-country.mp3*), and the extended KEYGEN mix (keygen_credits.mp3). *not to be confused with midi-holiday_country.mp3, which is the corrupted mix The rest are undated. I haven't checked both formats on most of these, but I did on KEYGEN, and the datestamp is on both. I hope that represents a trend, but it's past my bedtime, so I'm not willing to confirm tonight.

The website Dogcheck themes (results and baci_perugina) do not have datestamps.

The newsletter tracks, for a change, BOTH have datestamp metadata! Both dogbonk_short.mp3 and sneaking.mp3 are dated 2023. ...I guess that's not surprising. (They also have BPM information. dogbonk is 130, sneaking is 175. That's exactly backwards of my intuition.... Tempo is weird sometimes.)

As it turns out, a few of Deltarune’s music files have year-of-release datestamps in their metadata:

Checker Dance (checkers.ogg) and Chaos King (kingboss.ogg) are both stamped 2016 (one year after Undertale, two years before ch1′s release). This makes sense--Toby’s stated he likes to finish scenes’ music before he starts programming, so a date early into ch1′s development cycle makes sense.

Giga Size (giant_queen_appears.ogg) and Berdly (berdly_theme.ogg) are stamped 2019 (one year after ch1, two years before ch2′s release). I would say there’s a pattern emerging here, except that...

Lost Girl (noelle_normal.ogg) and Ferris Wheel (noelle_ferriswheel.ogg) are stamped 2018 (same year as ch1). My understanding of Noelle has always been “maximum story importance,” so I’m not surprised he would work on Noelle’s cutscene music so early into development.

alarm_titlescreen.ogg (new Dogcheck) is stamped 2017 (before ch1). A moment as unimportant as this, I’d assume, Toby didn’t want to spend effort making music for, and just pulled out a random backlog song. I mean, that's what he did with April 2012 :)

Granted, this is all assuming these datestamps are accurate. Not sure why they wouldn't be, but.

[starshine-creativity]

WasLazy.DidTheSameThingWithTheMillieDrawingAndJustRebloggedWithTheFix.

Got a new stylus and made something quickly lol.

Ignore the small start of a head sketch at the start of the time lapse that was me thinking "Actually I'll go make a background."

Here's an Edit I forgot to patch some holes. Im that kind of person so G e t I t N o w B e f o r e I F i x I t

[a-captions-blog]

Image description start.

Two Tweets by Youself Munayyer @ YousefMunayyer [verified] that say: They attacked a funeral. The highest profile Palestinian funeral in years and for a slain journalist everyone loved and they did it on a Friday two days before Palestinians commemorate Nakba Day. The entire world was watching this moment and still. Just imagine what they do to Palestinians when the cameras are not there. Description end. Datestamp: 13 May 2022. Source: Twitter

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Datestamp: 28th Jan, 2022, and it’s been a yoyo sort of week IN SPITE OF BEING THREE DAYS, JUST THREE DAYS so fuck it, Tumblrs can have a little update, as a treat.

Well, I say little. Pretty big. This will be the last I put on this particular thread, next time I’ll make a new post again in order to keep the whole thing to a manageable length because I am still haunted by that damn walrus and I have Learned.

Let’s start with some trained dancing pigs!

Tuesday

Okay, so, you’ll all recall that the Met Police had said that they don’t investigate past events, which I’m sure is a fascinating statement for anyone who has ever been investigated by them and Extremely Reassuring for those who rather hoped the police might actually provide some sort of anti-crime protection beyond “We literally walked in on a criminal mugging someone and we had nothing better to do so we arrested them.” BUT! Police Commissioner for the Met or-whatever-the-fuck-her-title-isn’t Cressida Dick has clarified that if there’s clear evidence AND not investigating would undermine public faith and trust in the law then they’ll magnanimously make an exception, just this once.

And, uh. Downing Street, in trying to downplay the birthday party, accidentally admitted to breaking the law. Because somehow, even now, they inexplicably still do not know the law they themselves made.

Here’s a bizarre factoid about the whole thing, though - Boris Johnson knew the Met were getting involved by start of play on Tuesday, because they told him. But then, he decided not to tell anyone else. Literally. The rest of the cabinet, the staff of Number 10, the entire damn Tory party, only found out when the rest of us peons did - when the Met held the press conference to announce it. Even though Downing Street had had its morning meeting, BlowJo did not give them any warning.

Why??? Unknown. Ostrich theory, maybe. Or, maybe he genuinely and honestly did not realise the Met were going to publicly announce it, and thought he could keep it under wraps. He is a very stupid man so it is possible.

Anyway, rumours instantly abound. What will this mean for the Gray Report? Will it be published on time? Will it be published at all? Is she sharing the findings with the police? Won’t someone please think of Sue Gray’s work-life balance?

Tell you what though, says the UK press. Guess who was at that birthday party?

OH HELLO THERE, CHANCELLOR, IS THE BUBBLE BURSTING AFTER ALL?

That’s right, it’s Rishi Sunak, “accidentally” wandering into Big Dog’s birthday party. Because he totally wasn’t invited. At all. Why would he have been? After all, there was no party. It was a work event. This is why he, as the Chancellor, was not invited, but Lulu Lytle, the interior design woman who was renovating Big Dog and Carrie Antoinette’s flat on taxpayer’s money (its own scandal, I won’t bore you), was invited. They were all working. On government stuff.

Sunak is also fervently denying being invited to any other party, so we’re back to the original Johnson defence that tickled me so much: “I have no friends and am desperately disliked so I was not there.”

Meanwhile, BJ and the mistress run away to Chequers to feel hard done by, because it turns out they literally don’t think they did anything wrong with that birthday party. They think it counted as a household gathering. They think Downing Street, a building that is three very big houses joined together of over 100 rooms and several hundred staff members, plus an adjoining door to Whitehall, counts as a household, and therefore is within the rules. They are very stupid people.

Also, that party included singing, and while that sounds like a minor point, you need to understand that singing indoors was illegal at that point, because choir practices kept turning out to be super spreader events - we were not allowed to sing at funerals, but here’s the court fools of Westminster capering and tuning away over a cake with a fucking union jack on it, and if you’ll allow a moment of extreme nationalistic self-indulgence on the part of this Welsh reporter, Tumblrs, I bet they didn’t even fucking sing it well, I bet they didn’t harmonise, I bet they weren’t even in fucking tune, the pack of English tone deaf cunts.

(ahem)

But then the day is rounded off very nicely by Boris Johnson’s supporters.

Because you see, while this particular party is now really capturing everyone’s imagination more than any other, but the thing is...

This one actually and legitimately wasn’t Big Dog’s fault. 

It was a surprise birthday party. Hosted by his mistress. He didn’t plan or know about this one. And while that obviously doesn’t remotely absolve him, given that (a) he didn’t stop it and (b) ALL THE REST OF THIS SAGA, it does mean, hilariously, that the most damaging blow of this whole sorry affair to date actually wasn’t him.

So the usual crowd jumped in to mumble about the birthday party. 

“Are we talking party poppers and wild Ibiza nights?” asks Michael Fabricant, his knock-off BJ wig wobbling in indignation. “I don’t think so!”, which is certainly true, because he really doesn’t think or understand anything.

“So, when people in an office buy a cake in the middle of the afternoon for someone else they are working in the office with and stop for ten minutes to sing happy birthday and then go back to their desks, this is now called a party?” asks Nadine Dorries on Twitter.

“My god, Nadine,” reads the top response. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”

But the best response is from Conor Burns MP, a new clown on a unicycle teetering his way into the ring.

“It was not a premeditated, organised party,” he said. “He was, in a sense, ambushed with a cake.”

Google “ambushed by cake” if you want a look at the memes.

That was fun! Let’s see a man getting fired out of a cannon!

Wednesday

Boris fatshames a man for asking about the cake.

Yeah, you read that right. That’s where we’re going now. Ian Blackford MP of the SNP stands up in the Commons to demand answers. “The impending National Insurance tax hike hangs like a guillotine while they eat cake,” he says.

“I don’t know who has been eating more cake,” smugly claims a man who willingly refers to himself as Big Dog, while the Tories jeer and laugh.

So now he’s embroiled in a brand new scandal with the eating disorder charity Beat.

Meanwhile, Sue Gray announces two juicy bits of gossip: firstly, regardless of the Met investigation, she will still release her report on time. Secondly, she has been mysteriously given photographs of the PM at parties surrounded by wine bottles. So that’s fun.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the man with the dubious honour of being the Stupidest Tory, decides to try and help. He realises that Boris’ support among the Tories is crumbling, and that he needs to shore it up. So he issues a nuclear level threat to keep them all in line, and make them back BJ.

If Boris goes, he says, we will go to a General Election.

One can only assume that he just... forgot that the world does not entirely consist of Tories. “Right-o,” every other party in the land has cheerfully said. “Good to know.” The polls show that 71% think Boris should resign if the Met finds he broke the law.

And outside of the doors of Number 10, the whole thing continues to bleed over into other things, and unrelated issues. There’s a whole THING going on at the Port of Dover right now, for example, which is of course the main port into the UK from the continent. The queues from shipping lanes have become gargantuan - this is going to sound like a joke, but you can literally now see the queues from space. The government have been denying it’s down to Brexit.

But on Wednesday it’s found that it is, indeed, down to Brexit. The IT software we had to create to now process inbound vehicles takes 15 minutes minimum per vehicle. Dover is slowly becoming overrun by a sort of lorry version of Snake.

And then, to round off the day, there is a Committee on Lobbying and Transparency, which given the scale of the corruption on show, goes about as well as you’d expect. Ian Hislop, the editor of satirical independent news outlet Private Eye, gets to be there.

Here’s a couple of highlights, for your viewing pleasure.

Woo, the cannon was great! Now let’s move onto the fire jugglers!

Thursday

I’m going to save the best til last because there was an Event yesterday and nnnnggggg okay no I won’t spoil it for you, you’ll see

Right

Okay so let’s start with Conor Burns!

Now he was the one who coined the Ambushed By Cake meme. In the intervening time, Downing Street, now being investigated by the actual literal police because they accidentally admitted to an illegal birthday party, have spotted that they in no way can admit the cake and the singing happened, so they’re having to go to all those helpful BJ supporters and get them to retract anything they’ve said about cake or singing.

“I now understand there wasn’t a cake,” Conor Burns says gravely.

Hey, speaking of those BJ supporters, here’s a bit of forbidden knowledge! I’ve mentioned before that my husband is friends with a relatively senior journalist in the UK. Nowhere has published this, so I will fully understand if you don’t believe me on this one, or want to take it with a degree of scepticism, Tumblrs, but I fucking howled so I’m passing this along:

You know how a defining trait of these people seems to be the James Bond 2Kool mission names? Operation Save Big Dog, Operation Red Meat, Operation Dead Meat, the Pork Pie Plot, Operation Domino...

It turns out behind closed doors the supporters of Big Dog are referring to themselves, and you’re very welcome for this information, because they are calling themselves THE PRAETORIAN GUARD

(I laughed until I pissed a kidney)

Meanwhile, Boris realises - or, more likely, a sleep-deprived PR intern finally snaps and batters him over the head with a hammer made of crushed Red Bull cans until his red nose honks in agreement - that he can’t keep going “Nah fam it wasn’t me” and he needs to acknowledge SOME level of wrongdoing if he wants to survive it. So, on with the latest non-pology. He declares that he "regrets" not strictly enforcing lockdown rules in Downing Street during the pandemic but stands by the notion that "he is still the right man to lead" the country. 

Interestingly, and with a tingling sense of foreboding, he declares that the Gray Report will be published in its entirety after all.

AND THEN

Okay oh my god okay so

There’s a British comedian called Joe Lycett. He’s a bit of a legend in Wales because a couple of years back, Hugo Boss tried to sue a small Swansea microbrewery called Boss Brewery for trying to use the word Boss, which they claimed they’d trademarked. In response, Joe legally changed his name to Hugo Boss and started gigging and endorsing rival brands using it, and basically held it hostage until they dropped the lawsuit. Boss Brewery now sell a pizza called the Lycett in his honour. Anyway

So Joe Lycett decides he’s in the mood to troll the entire British government, and so tweets that there has been a leak from the Sue Gray report. He mocks up a summary page to look all official, and a good time is had by all, until someone who works for the Conservative Party gets in touch and tells him that somehow - SOMEHOW - they all took it seriously and have spent several hours panicking until someone with more than about 6 braincells on a good day manages to calm them all down and explain that this is a parody.

Oh boy! It must have been so convincing! Let’s take a look at this leaked summary page:

Transcript:

A summary of my main findings:

A culture of Covid-19 regulation rule breaking at Number 10 Downing street.

Games were played which were known as ‘Slow Dance’ and ‘Pass the Arsehole’.

A number of WhatsApp groups were established to organise gathering, with titles including ‘Definitely A Meeting ;)’ and ‘Down It Street’.

At one party, [REDACTED] a senior minister insisted all cabinet ministers get onto a table and perform Pure & Simple by Hear’Say. 

Before one of the gatherings, [REDACTED] who worked closely with the PM insisted everyone be tested and was subsequently referred to as ‘Twateral Flow’ by advisors.

A video of the PM’s wife at one party confirms her attendance in which she is heard saying, ‘it could be as few as four and as many as sixty kids’ lol.

One advisor insisted this report makes clear ‘it is categorically not a breach of the rules to be part of a human centipede if said centipede was formed prior to lockdown.’

Please forward any queries to my email ItsAllSueGravyBaby@aol.com

End Transcript

YEAH THAT’S RIGHT

THEY THOUGHT IT WAS REAL

Anyway back to the clowns!

Today

The Met ask Sue Gray to only make minimal mention in the Report of events they themselves are investigating, “to avoid prejudicing the investigation”. Which rather explains why BJ was suddenly fine with it being published, if he knew hers was about to be strangled. 

But, will it? We don’t yet know. They’ve only asked at this stage, officially. She still hasn’t said when it will be published. There’s a lot that could happen.

And meanwhile, we’re all thinking about potential successors to Big Dog right now, and to be honest, one of the single biggest names has been Liz Truss. You’d think, given how much damage BJ is now doing to the Tories, the parliament, the...whole country, everything really, that Tory newspapers would be trying to big up the potential successors so that a removed Johnson does not mean the complete disaster Jacob Rees-Mogg just promised.

So it’s very interesting that the Telegraph are leading the charge on the story that Liz Truss flew to and around Australia on a taxpayer funded private jet costing half a million pounds. 

Even more so because this is not a new piece of information. But it IS new to the general public. This may, therefore, be the start of a tipping point: we’ve all ignored a lot of Tory scandals for the last few years, but maybe it’s all coming back now.

To conclude, this article by the BBC includes a full timeline of all parties under investigation so far (complete with some photos), although clearly there is, as others have put it, a maniac with a grudge and a shit ton of photos steadily releasing more and more evidence every week, so we’ll see if that grows at all...

The Adventures of Big Dog the Clown, 24th Jan 22

LET’S GET YOU IN THE MOOD, KIDS, IT’S A WILD ONE!!! Background music for your enjoyment. If you’re on mobile, here’s a Spotify option. Want to really set the scene? Grab some snacks! Snacks such as, for example, popcorn, like this popcorn given out to passers-by by Butterkist today in front of Downing Street.

OKAY so. Last update we had just learned that Will Wragg MP was accusing the Tory party of blackmail! News that came just as I was writing the damn update even. So, let’s pick up from there!

Well, naturally, as the rats are running from the sinking ship, Boris Johnson is cutting an increasingly lonely figure. But hey, you can always count on your true friends to defend you! Up until now, that’s been the job of Nadine Dorres (the galaxy-brained genius behind Operation Red Meat, more on that in a moment) and Jacob Rees-Mogg (a time travelling Victorian dandy too stupid to spot he’s landed 150 years in the future); but now, Tumblrs, in steps your new favourite clown character in this saga: Michael Fabricant.

Now Michael Fabricant is a terrible man who last year described Palestinian activists as “primitives” who are “trying to bring to London what they do in the Middle East”, which is frankly the mere tip of the iceberg, if an iceburg were made of frozen liquid shit and melted slugs. He is also, and I swear to god I am not shitting you Tumblrs, I swear this is genuine, he is a real man who has made these real choices - he is a man who appears to very literally be cosplaying Boris Johnson. Look at this:

SAME CLOWN WIG!!!!

He’s also spotted his sycophantic chance to worm his way into the mouldering and collapsing bodily cavity where Big Dog once had a heart, so he stepped up to the plate when he heard this TERRIBLE accusation of blackmail. Oh yes! The hour came and Fabricant was not found wanting! Let’s see his defence!

Keep reading

[pepoluan]

There's an international standard called ISO 8601 that specifies exactly one way to write dates:

YYYY-MM-DD

(The hyphen is optional.)

No, the standard does not allow abbreviation of the year. Years with less than four digits must also be prepended with "0" until they're four digits long. Single digit days or months MUST be prepended with "0".

So the third day of May in 2021 is always written as 2021-05-03.

And the fortieth day in the 20th year AD?

0020-02-09 or 0020-040

(The latter is specified by the standard as well, if the need is not to write dates but to just signify a certain cardinal day in the year -- the day number must be written in three digits.)

The first benefit is that when sorting datestamps written in ISO 8601, it will be a quick string sort: Earlier years will always be ordered before later years, earlier month-day in the same year will always be ordered before later month-day.

String sort will totally mess up the ordering of 11/13/2011 and 12/14/2010. You have to carve those datestamps first to properly order the dates.

(Writing month names as three-letter codes will also mess up the ordering, because FEB will appear before JAN while APR & AUG will appear before all other months, with DEC inserting itself between AUG and FEB.)

No problems with string-sorting 2011-11-13 and 2010-12-14. After 3 characters, the sorting algorithm already correctly knows which datestamp is earlier.

The second benefit is that there's no easy way anyone can tamper with the date.

3/MAY/2021 can be tampered into 23/MAY/2021 easily.

1/17/2022 can be tampered into 11/17/2022 easily.

2025-06-02 ... No one can easily modify that by simple adding of one or two digits. A tamperer must overwrite the digits and doing so is easier to detect than simple addition.

In summary:

Use ISO 8601.

I found this on Facebook and it's actually super important: