Tea Leaves and Link Trails

Things of interest found during too much web browsing, with an emphasis on Science Fiction, New Space projects, gadgets and whatever catches my eye.

[crowboy-bebop]

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)

source: hellgate osprey cam

[curlicuecal]

[aetherograph]

More context:

the first osprey is the father, the one that comes later is the mother.

ospreys are not eagles, they're ospreys

ospreys only eat fish, that's why they don't register this starling as possible food

the starling got home safely

the starling was not trying to eat the eggs, it was mostly curious and you can see it trying to hop under the osprey every time the osprey tries to sit down again--this is because the starling is still a baby and has the instinct to get under an adult for warmth, even though it mostly has its feathers. this scares the osprey because that is a Foreign Creature near its eggs.

at the end of the video you can see the ospreys starting to turn the eggs. birds do this so the yolk and/or embryo don't stick to the shell of the egg, which is bad for the egg's health.

ospreys have eyes adapted to seeing beneath the surface of the water!

[kaydeefalls]

When your hamster shoves an entire stick of zucchini in his cheek and then goes about his day. 🤣

[rattle-my-stars]

[frnkieroismydaddy]

“He’s not going to fit that in his cheek.”

“Oh, he’s chewing it, it’ll be smaller.”

“He can’t possibly-”

“shit, I guess he can.”

[supreme-leader-stoat]

IT’S AS BIG AS HE IS

[bitchesgetriches]

Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes

Companies that rushed to replace human labor with AI are now shelling out to have IRL workers to fix the technology's screwups.

Delicious. We love to see it.

[tobaeus]

@ralfmaximus

[ralfmaximus]

Ultimately, she spent 20 hours redoing the copy from scratch — and with her $100-per-hour rate, that meant her client was shelling out $2,000 for copy that likely would have ended up being far cheaper had a human just written it in the first place.

I love stories like this.

[tacofriend]

Get peer reviewed!

[lierdumoa]

[heycallmered]

people will really come into kink spaces and say you can't forcefem women like there wasn't a feature length movie about an elderly gay man forcefemming a woman as part of scheme to thwart an elaborate assassination attempt before the killer even determined their target

[llama2237]

What... What movie is this.

[heycallmered]

[heycallmered]

ain't no way in hell this post even breaks 500

[marmoset-marmoset]

i was trying so hard to remember the nonexistent assassination subplot in My Fair Lady

[hellenhighwater]

Well those are allllmost done

[codebreakerblue]

question. why do you have 7 featureless grey monoliths in your driveway

[hellenhighwater]

There's eight actually but the last one is still in the garage

[jackfromthefairytale]

question. why do you have eight featureless grey monoliths

[hellenhighwater]

They're actually a really dark purple

[fishofthewoods]

question. why do you have seven featureless really dark purple monoliths in your driveway and an eighth in the garage

[hellenhighwater]

Some of them do have features though. There's holes and hinges and stuff, so I can put secrets in em

[nobodywasneverhere]

question. why do you have 8 really dark purple occasionally featureful monoliths

[hellenhighwater]

The heart wants what the heart wants

[fred-the-dinosaur]

this reads like a muppet sketch

[fred-the-dinosaur]

see? See!??!

[hellenhighwater]

You're not wrong

[hellenhighwater]

This post is less than six months old.

[worldheritagepostorganization]

World Heritage Post

[marauders4evr]

It occurs to me that there are people who weren’t on this website in 2012 and therefore never saw the magical gif that you can actually hear:

It’s been over five years and that still impresses the hell out of me.

[nealashitposts]

So I've got this friend whose nervous because she's trans and dating this guy who she hasn't told yet because they've only been on a two dates. For this story let's call the friend Jane and the guy she was dating Jason. Happy ending don't worry.

So I tell Jane to bring her boy over to a bbq I'm having and she can tell him she's trans at my place surrounded by queer and trans people who love her and will support her if he ends up being awful.

She waits till the end of the bbq to tell him the news, by which point the rest of us have learned that Jason is a kind, friendly, empathetic, hard working, dummy. So we sit down, all of us a little worried about this gym bro's reaction when she tells him she's trans, and that she understands if he doesn't want to keep dating her it's no big deal.

He's baffled, so we explain what trans is, and after the disclosure that she hasn't had bottom surgery yet...

"Oh you have a dick?"

"... yeah."

He look's around at the room full of people with baited breath, his clearly a little afraid girl friend says

"Oooohhhh! I get it! You think- don't worry Babe! Watch this!"

And ya'll this man jumps up, runs into the kitchen and returns with one of the bratwurst we had for grilling and proceeds to tilt his head back, put it down his throat, hold it in his mouth for a moment, and spit it up without even a whisper of a gag and then looks around at the group absolutely beaming with pride.

My mans saw his worried girlfriend and her support network and thought to him self "Oh they don't think I can't please my girl, but I'll show them!"

[nealashitposts]

I do feel the need to add that later he excitedly tell the group that as a straight guy, he never thought that skill would be useful outside hotdog eating contests.

[hyperrbolic-orange]

"Man its too bad that im straight since I've got like no gag reflex and all."

"Honey, I must tell you, i am in fact trans and I have not had bottom surgery."

"My god... everything's coming up Jason."

[dancinbutterfly]

Pure of heart dumb of ass hetero of sexual

[actordougjones]

Yes, His Grace, Duke Douglas of Sealand is even older now. As each year passes, I am more sorry about starting this tradition of posting a semi-tasteful photo.

DougJones #birthday #oldnakedguy

[jeremybrettholmes]

One of the finest and most beloved Watsons ever to grace the screen has passed away. David Burke was 91 years old, just shy of his 92nd birthday, and he is survived by his wife Anna Calder-Marshall and his son Tom Burke.

By all accounts, he was a gentleman and a wonderful human being. He could have stayed on to play Watson much longer, which would have made many of us very happy, but he chose to leave the show to be nearer to his family, especially since Tom was very young at the time.

His was not the first intelligent and competent Watson, but this version marked a turning point in mainstream depictions, from comedic sidekick to a hero in his own right.

RIP, dear sir. You will be missed. Thank you for everything.

~*~

To read a longer and moving tribute, please check out the I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere website: https://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2026/05/david-burke-first-watson-of-granada-era.html. The tribute includes a link to the interview that the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes Podcast conducted with David and his wife a few years ago.

[creating-tabs]

That’s how they get you. They’re under the goddamn ground.

[retropopcult]

Tremors (1990)

[foone]

Important rules for the "age verification" era of the internet that we're living in:

1. Do not do age verification.

2. If you have to do age verification, cheat. Do not under any circumstances give them your real ID.

[very-gay-alkyrion]

Free Tool Says it Can Bypass Discord's Age Verification Check With a 3D Model

The tool presents users with a 3D model they can then manipulate to, the creator says, bypass Discord's age verification system.

Oh no I dropped my link, what a horrible thing! Sure hope this doesn't get reblogged until it reaches users from the UK and Brazil!

And remember to not make a second account just to test out what works best when verifying your identity

[asksanguinius40k]

A reminder that we still dont support Age Verification bullshit.

[flower-crowns-and-combat-boots]

Paywall removed here

[hungrymilliek]

Aaand here's the link to the project's Github.

GitHub - promptpirate-x/discord-id-bypass-tool: A verified tool that works on any potato computer that will let you bypass discord verificat

A verified tool that works on any potato computer that will let you bypass discord verification - promptpirate-x/discord-id-bypass-tool

[parkchanwoohoo]

How does this eve-- whatever

[san-sebastienne]

Dashiell Hammett, who basically invented the noir genre (think: The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man) hung out enough in the queer scene in San Francisco in the 20s-30s that he picked up some contemporary queer lingo that he folded into his stories. In The Maltese Falcon, there’s a scene where the wildly gay-coded villain shows up at a meeting with a skinny little blonde with a bad attitude and a gun in tow, and detective Sam Spade tells him to “leave the gunsel outside” — gunsel being contemporary gay slang for a young, effeminate man who probably bottoms (from the Yiddish gansl, meaning gosling). Basically, he’s saying “I’m here to talk to you, not your twink.”

However, a lot of writers mimicking Hammett did not know gay lingo or Yiddish, saw the word “gun,” and assumed “gunsel” meant “scary bodyguard with a gun.” They took off with a word they didn’t understand and spread it so fast that it’s now basically impossible to read a noir story written between 1930-1960 without someone accidentally being called a twink at least once. Look out for it next time you’re reading Raymond Chandler or his ilk, I guarantee you’ll find it.

[impormable]

Olivia Jaimes’ Nancy continues to amaze and delight.

[ralfmaximus]

This really might be the finest 4th wall joke ever pulled off.

[changes]

An update for users in Brazil and the United Kingdom

To continue our commitment to user safety and to comply with local laws, we will start using age groups to determine access to certain experiences.

People in Brazil or in the UK, who are 18 or older, will soon need to verify their age to change content label settings and view mature-labeled content. Until then, the settings will be locked to hide.

As a reminder, verification is handled by our age-assurance partner, k-ID. Tumblr won't have access to the information you submit, just the final age-verification result. Documents are deleted after confirmation, and facial scan data never leaves your device. 

Questions? Contact Tumblr support or learn more about these changes here.

[tigerator]

all uk & brazilian citizens must forfeit their biometric information to third party overseas ai-driven for-profit corportions seeking to harvest and sell this data because, despite the fact we already banned porn, we need to stop you looking at your trans friend's blogs who we habitually mark as mature content because of deeply transphobic moderation that we refuse to address.

thanks.

[pocblr]

LUPITA NYONG'O 📷 Instagram

[naranjapetrificada]

For some context missing from this post, these aren't just beautiful photos of Lupita posing with a basket of beautifully arranged fruit. There are 77 fruits of varying sizes in that basket, each representing one of her uterine fibroids.

She's been trying to raise awareness around uterine fibroids and the pain they cause, so stripping that context from these pictures seems wilder than usual. Sure you could go to her instagram to see more details, but how many people are gonna do that?

[naamahdarling]

The MRI on her Instagram post is absolutely unbelievable.

Fibroids and endometriosis are absolute demons from hell, they wreck lives and steal hopes and ambitions and I wish them a very happy fuck off forever.

[dduane]

Nasty and sophisticated scam: BEWARE of this!

That "Pending PayPal Charge" Email Is a Scam — Even Though It Really Came From PayPal

If an email recently landed in your inbox with a subject line like "Pending charge of USD 987.90 for account activation. Questions? Call 855

Don’t get caught off guard by this. It’s quite a slick one.

[kerryweaverlesbian]

What to actually do If you get one of these, the answer is boring and it works every time: Don't call the number. Don't reply. Don't click links in the email — not even the unsubscribe link. Open a fresh browser tab, type paypal.com yourself, and log into your account. Check your activity. You'll see either nothing, or a tiny incoming payment from a stranger that you can ignore. Then forward the original email as an attachment to [email protected] and delete it. If you want to go a step further, report the phone number to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov — every report makes it slightly harder for these operations to keep running. And if you've already called? Don't beat yourself up — these scams are designed by professionals to fool smart people. Hang up, run a malware scan if you installed anything they asked you to install, change your PayPal and bank passwords from a different device, and call your bank's real fraud line (the number on the back of your card) to flag your accounts. Move fast, but you don't need to panic.

from the above linked article. For the UK the email to forward phishing scams to is [email protected], texts can be forwarded on to 7726 (for free!) and as a victim of fraud you can report it here (or here for Scotland)

[comicgeekscomicgeek]

— If an email recently landed in your inbox with a subject line like "Pending charge of USD 987.90 for account activation. Questions? Call [phone]" — don't call that number. Don't click anything. And whatever you do, don't panic-dial to "stop the charge."

You're being targeted by one of the cleverest scams going right now, and the reason it works is uncomfortable: the email genuinely came from PayPal.

The trick is in the subject line, not the email

When most people think "phishing email," they picture sketchy senders, broken English, and links to weird domains. This scam is the opposite. The email passes every authenticity check — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, all green. It comes from PayPal's actual mail servers. The fonts are right. The footer is right. The unsubscribe link works. If you forwarded it to a security expert and asked "is this really from PayPal?" they'd have to say yes.

So how is it a scam?

Scammers have figured out that PayPal lets anyone send small amounts of money to anyone else, and that PayPal will dutifully email the recipient a notification. The scammer sends you a payout of, say, one Hungarian forint — about a quarter of a cent. PayPal's system then automatically generates and sends you a real, legitimate, fully-authenticated email confirming the transaction.

Here's the catch: the email's subject line is whatever the scammer typed when they set up the payout. PayPal doesn't sanitize it. So they write something terrifying like "Pending charge of USD 987.90 — call this number with questions" and PayPal's servers cheerfully deliver that subject line straight to your inbox, wrapped in a perfectly legitimate-looking notification.

The actual transaction in the email body is for 1 forint. There is no $987.90 charge. There never was. But by the time most people read carefully enough to notice that, they've already dialed the number. —