#rob rambles

[persimmon-draws]

I hope the one piece is mcr5

[iamtryingtobelieve]

A little gift from my friends at Nailed Podcast

Cannot wait to spend ages staring at these amazing art pieces from the album that saved me as a stupid teenager who felt too much

Thank you Blake and Jess

If you're a NIN fan, please check out the Nailed Podcast. They are currently on a break but due to start their coverage of Year Zero very soon

[riteofthunder]

constantly thinking abt this nitw quote

I get it. This won't stop until I die. But when I die, I want it to hurt. When my friends leave, when I have to let go, when this entire town is wiped off the map, I want it to hurt. Bad. I want to lose. I want to get beaten up. I want to hold on until I'm thrown off and everything ends. And you know what? Until that happens, I want to hope again. And I want it to hurt. Because that means it meant something. It means I am something, at least... pretty amazing to be something, at least...

[shitphobe420blazeit]

Really glad I started with Taskmaster NZ because if I had started with Taskmaster UK I really would not have finished it lol

I just finished the UK series 1, after watching all of the NZ seasons, and I miss Paul Williams :( also I think Jeremy Wells is a better taskmaster tbh. At least, comparing him to series one Greg Davies. Idk maybe Greg gets better lol. Also Paul is DEFINITELY superior to Alex.

I also was just not that big a fan of the bickering between contestants and taskmaster on points happening almost EVERY task in UK series 1. And they're just...mean for no reason to the contestants?? It's not even really that funny usually idk, it's not my thing

[l3viat8an]

Hey Ro 🧡!!

I'm travelling mid September!! But rn I wanna share a thought I've been having for a while.

Going in a travel with the boys. Everyone packed inside a car and having to sit on their lap 😌 and be fucked and passed around from lap to lap like a "blunt". Being stuffed by each of the sins 👌

With love

- 🍋

Hiya 🍋!! A trip omgg sounds like fun XD

Also ‘Like a blunt’ is honestly the best way to describe it too- helpsjskks

and the only reason they’ll all actually take turns is because one; you’re enjoying it and two; somebody has to drive / change seats at least twice so they can all get a turn- (and yk give you a break) shhshsh

[robthegoodfellow]

summer retrospective time because i'm feeling down about term starting up and not writing as much as i wanted to but I KNOW this is ridiculous and my goals were unreasonable.

so totally unasked for and unprompted here's what i got:

Chapters 8 and 9 of Upside-Down - 32k (total wip 118k) - E - Harringrove - Crazy long March chapter wherein an ominous phone rings and rings, Billy experiences some firsts (first time playing D&D against his will! first time fucking Steve! first time enduring a birthday party!), and Eddie drags Billy to a thrash metal concert. In Flayedville, the kids rally the troops to save Billy, he and Steve share body heat, and plans don't go as planned.

Two fics written for upcoming @strangerthingscharityzine totaling 4k words in their original state, trimmed down to 1.5k words each for the zine edition. Idk if I'm allowed to summarize but one of them made Remy cry!

That Bartender Sure is Something - 1k - G - Harringrove - Sideways scene rewrite from alt character's POV wherein I try to lay groundwork for why Steve's parents are out of town so often (aside from my need to give boys safe space to fuck and be super freaking domestic).

Chapters 11 and 12 of Only One Bed - 13k (total wip 59k) - E - Harringrovesoningham or whatever Steve/Billy/Eddie/Chrissy is called - Chrissy POV and Eddie POV chapters wherein Chrissy and Billy bond and then Billy/Eddie/Chrissy navigate their dynamic as asymmetrical polyamorous triad. Mostly cute!! Minimal angst!!

¿Por qué no los dos? - 18k - E - Harringroveson/Metalsandwich - What was supposed to be an excuse to make Steve and Eddie thirst over Billy in space buns becomes unexpectedly harrowing exploration of aromantic experience for me and apparently others, some of whom may be entitled to compensation. But there's smut... at the end?

Drafted aaalmost first half (7k) of @bigbangharringrove fic wherein Steve flirts with necromancy and necrophilia and NO STOP where are you going it's all gonna be fine!!! See, Billy died in this contemporary fantasy version of Hawkins where magic and supernatural creatures are just kinda there and so Steve tries to revive him but he imports the wrong file. The wrong Billy. Because there happens to be a lust demon that goes by the same name as Steve's dearly departed husband and let me tell ya he is NOT jazzed to be here. Working with @LucaDoodleDoo who is awesome AND so far has not run away!

Drafted 1.5k of fic for upcoming @harringrovezine. Still on track to be way too long but I WILL trim it down. Not sure what else I'm free to say but I'm excited how it's shaping up?

what follows is me convincing myself i did a good job

And that's... that's it. About 76.5k in all. Which is more than I realized (and also according to haphazard math is more than last summer by maybe 10k?)

I'm not usually fixated on word count much (aside from like laugh-crying when a fic just balloons way bigger than anticipated), and more words does not equal better words by ANY means, but I think this gives me a reality check about getting down on myself. I didn't finish the major things I originally set out to finish but... yeah, such is life when you have more than one WIP in which you are painfully invested 😅

And it's not like I won't EVER finish them which is prob my biggest fear because i had a rep growing up for all my grand plans and projects just losing steam and going nowhere. But I am capable of finishing fics because look ma, there's 3 whole multi-chap fics with the little green check mark (please actually DON'T look, ma).

I'm just babbling now. When work starts I'll be back to writing in random libraries after last bell and my output will slow, and I'm sad about it. But wow you know what I did shit out a bunch of words in like 2.5 months so at least there's that.

(Hesitant to post this because I'm sure it looks like flexing or fishing or something? Or like I'm implying that unless you too are shitting out words you suck? Which uhh I am not! The intent is more for Present Me to flex on Past Me, maybe? And fish some reassurance out of cold hard numbers to more easily put things in perspective.)

Mostly this did work, though! I feel better about the summer. If you need a boost, look over what you've done across a certain span of time using whatever measurement suits you and talk yourself into a pat on the back.

Pat, pat.

[allthedavesallofthem]

Ads are now auto-playing sound on Tumblr mobile. I have combed my user settings and cannot find any way to disable this, and it ignores the user's auto-play media setting.

This ain't gonna work, @staff. I am not gonna get jumpscared by an ad every couple of minutes when scrolling my dash, and I have better things to do than constantly mute/unmute my phone between ads and anything I actually want to listen to.

This is unacceptable. I understand that ads help keep the lights on, but at least have some basic respect for your users' experiences.

[rob-thedairyqueen]

A bug tried to fly up my nose…

[allthedavesallofthem]

It is just astonishing how many layers of the software development and release process had to fail in order for a catastrophe of this magnitude to take place, especially on something as sensitive and critically important as cybersecurity software.

Like, okay, some software engineer wrote some buggy code. Who cares, coders write bugs all of the time, ideally it'll get caught in code review. So then code review misses the bug (well, assuming they even did a code review), but it's still not a big deal yet, shit happens and people miss stuff. Pre-production test suites, either manual or automated (ideally a little of both) are the next line of defense before production deployment.

And then pre-production testing fails to catch it. For a bug this massive - literally every computer it touches just immediately crashes - this seems to indicate that their pre-prod testing protocols were either:

A: woefully insufficient and completely failed to validate functionality in anything even remotely resembling production conditions,

B: deliberately circumvented to push out a release quickly, or

C: just didn't exist at all. Tbh, I think this one is the least likely for CrowdStrike, as we probably would've heard whistleblowing about it by now, but at this point, who knows?

All three of these possibilities are extremely alarming, each for their own separate reasons. In any case, the bug slips through to production and things are now Officially Pretty Bad. Real customers are going to be impacted and probably quite upset. The severity of the bug and how difficult it is to resolve in many cases does not help matters.

Well, all is not totally lost! Updates to critical pieces of software such as this would usually go out in staggered waves. A small percentage of customers, say, anywhere from 1-10%, would receive the update first, then the situation would be monitored for a bit to make sure everything looked normal, then the deployment would be scaled out to all machines. Surely a bug of this severity would be picked up in the first wave, then the further deployments would be called off and damage control could begin. You've ruined the days of a handful of IT departments, but at least-

Oh. There was no staggered deployment. This went out to the entire world all at once. And it's an automatic update that starts without user intervention. Every layer of incompetence and negligence all the way up the chain has now added up to create one of the biggest software engineering catastrophes in history.

And they released it on a Friday.

idk if people on tumblr know about this but a cybersecurity software called crowdstrike just did what is probably the single biggest fuck up in any sector in the past 10 years. it's monumentally bad. literally the most horror-inducing nightmare scenario for a tech company.

some info, crowdstrike is essentially an antivirus software for enterprises. which means normal laypeople cant really get it, they're for businesses and organisations and important stuff.

so, on a friday evening (it of course wasnt friday everywhere but it was friday evening in oceania which is where it first started causing damage due to europe and na being asleep), crowdstrike pushed out an update to their windows users that caused a bug.

before i get into what the bug is, know that friday evening is the worst possible time to do this because people are going home. the weekend is starting. offices dont have people in them. this is just one of many perfectly placed failures in the rube goldburg machine of crowdstrike. there's a reason friday is called 'dont push to live friday' or more to the point 'dont fuck it up friday'

so, at 3pm at friday, an update comes rolling into crowdstrike users which is automatically implemented. this update immediately causes the computer to blue screen of death. very very bad. but it's not simply a 'you need to restart' crash, because the computer then gets stuck into a boot loop.

this is the worst possible thing because, in a boot loop state, a computer is never really able to get to a point where it can do anything. like download a fix. so there is nothing crowdstrike can do to remedy this death update anymore. it is now left to the end users.

it was pretty quickly identified what the problem was. you had to boot it in safe mode, and a very small file needed to be deleted. or you could just rename crowdstrike to something else so windows never attempts to use it.

it's a fairly easy fix in the grand scheme of things, but the issue is that it is effecting enterprises. which can have a looooot of computers. in many different locations. so an IT person would need to manually fix hundreds of computers, sometimes in whole other cities and perhaps even other countries if theyre big enough.

another fuck up crowdstrike did was they did not stagger the update, so they could catch any mistakes before they wrecked havoc. (and also how how HOW do you not catch this before deploying it. this isn't a code oopsie this is a complete failure of quality ensurance that probably permeates the whole company to not realise their update was an instant kill). they rolled it out to everyone of their clients in the world at the same time.

and this seems pretty hilarious on the surface. i was havin a good chuckle as eftpos went down in the store i was working at, chaos was definitely ensuring lmao. im in aus, and banking was literally down nationwide.

but then you start hearing about the entire country's planes being grounded because the airport's computers are bricked. and hospitals having no computers anymore. emergency call centres crashing. and you realised that, wow. crowdstrike just killed people probably. this is literally the worst thing possible for a company like this to do.

crowdstrike was kinda on the come up too, they were starting to become a big name in the tech world as a new face. but that has definitely vanished now. to fuck up at this many places, is almost extremely impressive. its hard to even think of a comparable fuckup.

a friday evening simultaneous rollout boot loop is a phrase that haunts IT people in their darkest hours. it's the monster that drags people down into the swamp. it's the big bag in the horror movie. it's the end of the road. and for crowdstrike, that reaper of souls just knocked on their doorstep.

[iamtryingtobelieve]

Didn't get a lot of pics and vids as I was too in the moment but Suede and Manics were absolutely spellbinding yesterday!

[riteofthunder]

i need to [remembers jokes about suicide are bad] kill myself

[allthedavesallofthem]

Elon Musk's brain apparently just totally stopped developing and maturing at age 13. His worldview is utterly simplistic, he is incapable of understanding nuance, and believes that he can become an expert in any subject after 15 minutes of study.

It even goes right down to the unironic obsession with the letter X, which he seems to think is genuinely the coolest goddamn thing on the planet.

Elon Musk is what happens when the kid who picks XxDEADLY_SHADOWSxX as their online handle has their mental and emotional development totally cease for the next 40 years, while also being given billions of dollars.

I slept in and just woke up, so here's what I've been able to figure out while sipping coffee:

Twitter has officially rebranded to X just a day or two after the move was announced.

The official branding is that a tweet is now called "an X", for which there are too many jokes to make.

The official account is still @twitter because someone else owns @X and they didn't reclaim the username first.

The logo is 𝕏 which is the Unicode character Unicode U+1D54F so the logo cannot be copyrighted and it is highly likely that it cannot be protected as a trademark.

Outside the visual logo, the trademark for the use of the name "X" in social media is held by Meta/Facebook, while the trademark for "X" in finance/commerce is owned by Microsoft.

The rebranding has been stopped in Japan as the term "X Japan" is trademarked by the band X JAPAN.

Elon had workers taking down the "Twitter" name from the side of the building. He did not have any permits to do this. The building owner called the cops who stopped the crew midway through so the sign just says "er".

He still plans to call his streaming and media hosting branch of the company as "Xvideo". Nobody tell him.

This man wants you to give him control over all of your financial information.

Edit to add further developments:

Yes, this is all real. Check the notes and people have pictures. I understand the skepticism because it feels like a joke, but to the best of my knowledge, everything in the above is accurate.

Microsoft also owns the trademark on X for chatting and gaming because, y'know, X-box.

The logo came from a random podcaster who tweeted it at Musk.

The act of sending a tweet is now known as "Xeet". They even added a guide for how to Xeet.

The branding change is inconsistent. Some icons have changed, some have not, and the words "tweet" and "Twitter" are still all over the place on the site.

TweetDeck is currently unaffected and I hope it's because they forgot that it exists again. The complete negligence toward that tool and just leaving it the hell alone is the only thing that makes the site usable (and some of us are stuck on there for work).

This is likely because Musk was forced out of PayPal due to a failed credit line project and because he wanted to rename the site to "X-Paypal" and eventually just to "X".

This became a big deal behind the scenes as Musk paid over $1 million for the domain X.com and wanted to rebrand the company that already had the brand awareness people were using it as a verb to "pay online" (as in "I'll paypal you the money")

X.com is not currently owned by Musk. It is held by a domain registrar (I believe GoDaddy but I'm not entirely sure). Meaning as long as he's hung onto this idea of making X Corp a thing, he couldn't be arsed to pay the $15/year domain renewal.

Bloomberg estimates the rebranding wiped between $4 to $20 billion from the valuation of Twitter due to the loss of brand awareness.

The company was already worth less than half of the $44 billion Musk paid for it in the first place, meaning this may end up a worse deal than when Yahoo bought Tumblr.

One estimation (though this is with a grain of salt) said that Twitter is three months from defaulting on its loans taken out to buy the site. Those loans were secured with Tesla stock. Meaning the bank will seize that stock and, since it won't be enough to pay the debt (since it's worth around 50-75% of what it was at the time of the loan), they can start seizing personal assets of Elon Musk including the Twitter company itself and his interest in SpaceX.

Sesame Street's official accounts mocked the rebranding.

[allthedavesallofthem]

Man this is way too good of a blog name to be wasted on a bot account...

[rob-thedairyqueen]

Forget about hearing people’s voices when you read their writing for a sec. I hope you all can clearly visualize my comedic sagely nodding and pretentious hand gestures when u read my posts

[rob-thedairyqueen]

Hm. There was one time, years ago, when I was looking for one of those homemade mermaid shows that was popular for kids to post on YouTube for a while (in case anyone hasn’t noticed, I’m completely obsessed with mermaids. There’s also a special place in my heart for childhood creativity. Anyways). So I watched one of the list videos that’s out there to help me discover one that I hadn’t seen yet, and saw one that looked promising, only to look it up and find that it had been deleted. In its place was a video explaining why it was deleted; the kids involved in its production had grown up and were embarrassed by their old videos. I remember being haunted by the fact that they’d put their whimsy away. It’s a bit of an odd thing, because I also understand why they’d want to protect their privacy and their image, and I respect it completely. It just. Also haunted me. I hope they still have copies of the series saved somewhere, so they can still have their old memories preserved.

I feel this way about old nostalgic video games becoming incompatible with new technology and getting lost. There’s one in particular that I have a really old, scratched up CD that I’m shocked still works. Did some digging and allegedly it’s saved on a site dedicated to preserving media like this, but for the time being, I don’t dare download it in case it’s actually a virus or something lol.

Recently I went through a lot of really old papers I had stuffed in a box in the basement. Most of them were old school papers, some were old drawings. A lot of the school papers had doodles all over them. I couldn’t keep everything, but I made sure to keep some. The drawing of a mermaid I kept in the front of my binder is taped into the back of Journal 12 now. I just need to find somewhere to store that comic I did in high school which was an advertisement for food-scented deodorant (I should really animate that one day, it’s still gold).

The story I wrote that made me realize I wanted to become an author? Yeah, that was written on a computer that got old and crashed. I may never see it again. I definitely have feelings about that. I mean, it was a weird story for sure; it was basically a rip-off of a book series I loved at the time, for one, and involved an alien developing a crush on one of the kid characters’ Mom for some reason (??? Young me, why??) but still. It would be nice to revisit it, if that was possible.

Anyways, all this is to say, I know what you mean. Art being lost is sad. I don’t know if I experience that loss as strongly or as deeply as you do, but nonetheless, I do experience it.

it genuinely makes me sad and kinda upset when someone purges all their old art off the internet like. barring harmful content what if someone liked that. What if someone would have. And now nobody will ever know and it's just gone. even people's old invader zim askblogs or whatever getting deleted feels like a micro alexandria to me and that's just something I made up. I wasn't even thinking of a specific one it just stresses me out. Is this the autism I don't get why nobody else seems to freak internally abt it like I do. I see artists whose blogs I've never even looked at go like "man so glad I deleted all my old stuff it's so clean" or saying they throw out art from when they were kids I'm like. how are you not hurling. How is that not distressing that is literally your tree rings why would you do that. I want to see what's out there. people want to see it I promise someone out there likes it

...don't they??? Does everyone get quietly irrationally upset by this as me, or is this just hyperfixation/autism/some amalgam of the two. I'm not a hoarder or obsessive compulsive or anything like that so i wonder..

Anyways. reblog if you had a favorite amateur youtube animator in your childhood whose channel got nuked without a trace one day that you still think about.

[shitphobe420blazeit]

Okay, a few more silly little gripes I have with Taskmaster UK:

the shot where they stamp the wax seal is SLOPPY. they dont wait for it to cool long enough before removing the seal >:(

the B-roll shots for before each task barely EVER have anything to do with the tasks! AND theyre reused >:( I'm only 4 series' in! and you're ALREADY reusing your b-roll? for shame