common advice for social anxiety is to tell yourself "people aren't going to think less of you just because you said something a bit daft" but the thing is. sometimes they will. and you just have to learn to be cool with that and to treat it as a dnd random encounter rather than letting it ruin your whole day
recent example. lady at my careers appointment had a post-it with her name on it stuck to the monitor, so i introduced myself by saying "hello, i'm eliot! you must be [name], it's nice to meet you!" and she stared at me as if i was the stupidest person alive and said icily, "yeah, i'm [name]. congratulations, you can read."
in bygone times this would have reduced me to a sort of quivering blancmange. thankfully i am now in a place where i was able to pull back, calmly evaluate this interaction, and say to myself "this woman should probably not be working in a customer-facing job"
Hey. If people aren't aware, Microsoft admitted they know who you and where you are at all times and will give your info to the police.
They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.
Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.
You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.
This article specifically notes:
For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesn’t care which VPN you use, only that it’s still the same Windows installation.
GDID is the persistent Windows ID that helped FBI trace a Scattered Spider hacker despite VPNs. Here's how it works and how to limit it.
Other important quotes:
What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows “surveillance software”.
Two things back that up:
There’s no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Apple’s advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Android’s works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.
Then there’s activation. Massgrave, the group behind Microsoft Activation Scripts, notes that Windows setup sends hardware info to Microsoft and gets identifiers back, the same tokens later used for Store access and licensing: “It’s impossible to prevent Windows from getting a GDID without breaking activation and UWP app[s].” Anyone who lost a license after swapping a motherboard has already met a smaller version of this.
please wear sunscreen!!! I've seen "fuck the beauty industrial complex" posts about complicated skincare regimens and am 100% with them except sometimes they mention sunscreen and no. no. absolutely not. sunscreen is a wonderful supportive friend who wants to keep you safe, and you should let her do it. throw out all your other cosmetics and skincare products if you want, but keep your sunscreen. and if you're not wearing sunscreen, start wearing it!!!! this is not about terror of aging, this is not about every tiny imperfection our fucked-up culture has made you feel insecure about, this is about protecting yourself from skin cancer. wear the damn sunscreen.
I will always prefer Wizards Is A Job over Wizards Is A Species as a trope.
Wizarding should be something you work towards. Being a wizard is like being an architect, or a painter, or a chemist. It’s something that makes your relatives ask “So are you still doing that or do you have an actual job now”
i was thinking about the weirdest phone calls i got when i still worked at the public library and i remembered this one phone call. it was probably less than 20 seconds long, but it still makes me laugh.
anyways, this woman called and without even saying hello after i said the usual “public library, how can i help you?” spiel, she said, “i have a very important question: when you shelve books, do you push them all to the front of the shelf or all the way back?”
it took me a second to process the question and then i answered that, at the library, we always shelve them so that they are even with the front edge so they’re easier to grab and see. she was obviously delighted by this answer and then, as if an afterthought, she asked, “okay, what about you? what do you do at home with your books?” i said i did the same thing. she hummed in obvious agreement and then just like that she said “thank you!” and hung up.
i never heard from her again. i hope she won whatever argument she was having.
for about a year, i worked at a call center for sprint. i have a similar kind of story.
a woman called, and said she had a question about the call history on her bill. “sure, let me just pull up your account-” and she cut me off going, “no, no, it’s not anything specific, it’s just. so, if you change the time on your phone, does that change the time on the bill?”
“uh… no? the time on the phone doesn’t matter, the call history is recorded by the towers.”
“ohhhh” she said in the saltiest voice i have ever heard “so even if you changed the timezone it wouldn’t change the time on the bill? to, say, the middle of the night?”
i stg yall i looked into the camera like i was on the office. “um… no? it would still be the local time of the tower. is there anything else i can help you with?”
to me, overly chipper: “nope! thank you! have a great day!” turning on someone as she hung up: “she says yoU’RE A LYING SACK OF-”
i still mean-snicker every time i think about it.
i used to work in a call center for a roadside assistance company, from late 2015 to early 2016. it was easily the most miserable job i’ve ever had, and the turnover rate was very high. people stuck on the side of the road tend to be quick to anger - understandably so - and it wears on you after awhile.
so i had been having a string of very time-consuming, draining calls. my line rings again, i steel myself for another angry caller, and i pick up. “[redacted] roadside assistance, how can i help you?” i chirp, in my Customer Service Voice.
“yeah, hi,” a gentleman with a thick southern accent responds. “my motorcycle won’t start.”
i brace immediately for another long call. motorcycles were notoriously difficult to work with - a lot of insurance companies wouldn’t insure them, and a lot of tow companies refused to pick them up because they require a specific sort of trailer.
“i’m sorry to hear that, sir. what’s your current location?”
“oh, i’m just at my house. i was wondering if it would be okay for me to just load it into my trailer and take it to my buddy’s shop. would that interfere with my insurance?”
i click through his account and am Relieved to discover he’s in the clear. “No sir, it looks like you’re good to go. Can I help you with anything else?”
A pause. “Have you heard the good news?”
My Anxiety, which had been receding, suddenly spikes into the fucking stratosphere. I live in the rural south. The “good news” usually means “Jesus” and i was in no mood to be proselytized to for god knows how long.
i steel myself for the Religious Talk. “What news, sir?”
“McDonald’s is now serving breakfast all day!”
I laughed so hard I almost cried. I hope that guy ate as many hashbrowns as he could.
Once in my old private school with only like 20 kids maximum, we started having a debate about this:
I’m not kidding.
One kid had a bag of goldfish crackers, and everyone somehow started to yell at each other about if the main fish is yellow or orange.
I became one of the spearheads for yellow, and my argument was that yellow was the base color and the orange is being used as shading, so it’s not actually orange. But the kid who was the spearhead for orange (let’s call him David) WOULD NOT listen to me. (he was always an asshole though, so it’s not too surprising)
This got so heated that the one guy who was in my grade (let’s call him Paul (half the kids had bible names anyway)) was looking at the back of the bag and found a phone number. I think it’s supposed to be there if there’s a problem with the food or something, but he thought he’d try to call to see what they’d say about our dilemma.
I don’t know exactly what the person told him at first, but Paul explained the situation to them and then they put him on hold for a couple minutes while we waited in suspense. I have no clue what they did to fact check this for us, but they pulled through, AND IT WAS YELLOW!!!!!!!!!!! EAT SHIT DAVID!!!!!! >:DDDD
We broke into a cacophony of either joyful cheers or enraged disappointment. I’m not sure if the person who answered our burning question could hear us, but I hope they did and got some joy out of it.
phm is decently popular in japan and i mostly see this when i check twitter and see accounts posting pictures of handmade rocky plushies that are so fucking round looking it brings a tear to my eye
btw, idk if this will be seen by any of the countless people who already have seen and reblogged this post, but heres the original guide posted on how to make the chibi-rocky! the OP also has a separate guide for a more accurate rocky, though obviously less simple of a guide than the little thingy shown off
(im surprised this post gained any attention, haha, if i had known i would have just shared the guides, the more handmade pebbles in the world the better)
Sometimes your bad coworker will be like "I can't do anything right & I ruin everything I touch :(" and you can't even comfort them because like damn. Yeah. You really can't do anything right and you do ruin everything you touch☝️
halo lore is so fucking funny to me. all it really needed to be was 'youre john halo and youre a badass space marine that doesnt afraid of anything' but instead youre a war orphan created by the space CIA to be a robo-pinkerton to put down galactic worker revolts, but luckily whole hordes of you were created right in time for the most evil alien empire to ever exist to make first contact with us by nuking a planet to glass
also, the evil alien empire isnt doing this because theyre evil, their trio of space popes asked an ancient sacred AI what the fuck humans were and the ai was like 'oh those are ants that god loves more than you' and the popes immediately decided the only way to keep their cushy jobs and big dumb hats was to annihilate the human race. it almost worked, too! luckily, one of the robo-pinkertons is so freakishly lucky an AI noticed the statistical anomalies surrounding him and took him in as her favorite little meow meow and now they have a toxic co-dependent relationship and are going to nuke alien new york
"Vanderhorst had been under the influence of MDMA and three litres of vodka she had consumed on the night of the offence last September, her lawyer Michael Hill told the court."
Do you remember the episode of Spongebob where he's training gary for the snail race and does a coach persona + calls gary a girl and has an aside where he's like "I called you a lady to demean you 🤓" and right after he says that it cuts to sandy and she somehow telepathically feels that Spongebob just did something misogynistic and us like I feel like I need to kick Spongebobs ass for some reason. And then she appears just at the end of the episode to kick his ass.
