Okay so since this hasn't died yet, I feel like I have to add to it. The story re: my dept. lead also being on Tumblr and us outing each other with the sacred texts is like, one of the least weird/that sounds fake things that's ever happened to me.
Some of the greatest hits include:
-Was taken to the military funeral of a total stranger in the swamp lands of Louisiana by another total stranger when I thought I was going to a work meeting. (A funeral that ended with the words 'Sombitch y'all done shot MeeMaw!')
-Asked Zac Efron to take a photo with me in 2008 and then getting so flustered that I asked 'Do you want to use my camera or yours?' (he was very nice and said 'Why don't we use yours.')
-Was dressed exactly the same as every single person in my company (not in a company uniform, we were all dressed like our IT guy) when we were raided by the FBI.
-Got asked out at my mother's funeral.
-Signed an autograph as Kat Dennings to a VERY drunk man at the Nashville Airport just to get him to leave me alone.
-Attended my husband's 15th high school reunion alone and entirely by accident.
-Had a man come into my cafe and harass my employees and when I told him to leave he got up in my face and said 'I can gut you like a fucking fish.' And with my utter lack of will to live, I said, without blinking or moving, 'You can try.'
-Acted as maid of honor and gave a wedding toast for a couple I did not know because the bride was desperate to not have her awful sister have the microphone and ruin everything.
Since @grimeysociety asked, I shall expound upon the tale of being raided by the FBI.
Back in 2018, I started working for a whole body donation center. If you don't know what that is, it's when someone decides to donate their bodies to science, we're like 'Yeah, hi, we'll take it.'
This company was very much on the up-and-up. We had pristine medical facilities, quarterly state inspections, all the right certifications, the whole nine. HOWEVER that's not the case for every whole body donation center in the country.
(If you're considering donation, it's a wonderful gift, but PLEASE research the company you're planning to use.)
For instance, there was a place somewhere in the US Southwest that, it turns out, was basically running a Frankenstein factory. I'm not going to go into details, but there's a Reuters article about it and it's pretty much the most horrific thing you can think of.
They were using Home Depot power tools for tissue harvest and Rubbermaid containers for transport. That is all I will say. That, and about 10% of the FBI team that raided their site had to go on mental health leave immediately after because they had insane PTSD.
SO. Where do I come in?
Well, as I said, I was working at a different, entirely reputable WBD, but when there are only about 15 organizations in the country that provide the same service as a Frankenstein factory, naturally, someone in charge thinks it's probably a good idea to check in with the rest of them. Just in case.
Fast forward to October of 2018 and allow me to introduce Josh* into the narrative.
Josh was our IT guy. He was our on-site, tech guru, long-suffering, likely underpaid and overworked IT guy. He was the floor model IT guy. Tall, bearded, very quiet, very good at his job and had a tendency to wear the same thing to work pretty much all the time. Black jeans, black t-shirt, white tennis shoes, red flannel shirt and a black beanie.
Every day. Rain, shine, 90 degrees, 20 degrees, didn’t matter. This was Josh’s uniform.
So about a week before Halloween, we all get together to start talking about playing a little joke on Josh. We all decided we were going to dress up as Josh for Halloween. Everyone could assemble a little Josh costume, oh it’ll be so funny, we might even get him to laugh. Everyone was on board. EVERYONE from the receptionist to the CEO--everyone was doing this.
Halloween that year fell on a Wednesday. Unfortunately for us and our brilliant plan, Josh did not work on Wednesdays. So we decided it would actually be even funnier if we all dressed up on November 1st. So that Josh would come into work on a seemingly random Thursday and see everyone dressed up as him.
And it worked! Everyone did it! Josh actually laughed and sent out a little email telling us all how funny he thought it was, grading people’s Joshumes. A wonderful day.
Until about 1pm when the FBI arrived to raid our office.
They herded us into one of the lecture rooms and explained what they were doing there, made sure we didn't go back to our offices or make any phone calls, basically babysat us until the other members of their team could secure the files they needed and inspect the facilities.
We were all so freaked out that no one was thinking about what we all must have looked like. 75 employees. Sitting together in a room. All dressed exactly alike from our beanies down to our white sneakers.
I didn't realize how it looked either until one of the other FBI agents came in and straight up stopped in his tracks at the sight of all of us and under his breath went, "What in the actual Christ..."
Then they closed our office for 2 days while they investigated further, found no wrong-doing, and let us return to business as usual.
No one ever suggested we do a group costume again.
The reality of how much damage AI mania is doing to our ability to run institutions effectively.
Not that most of us can DO anything about it, but at least this is validation that we're not crazy and the world really is running full tilt over a cliff.
It's really refreshing to have someone describe this in plain language, with specifics. Someone on the ground, not an outside commenter:
This was a terrible mistake. It backfired in the most predictable way imaginable – every lukewarm client that saw the chatbot in action, even with us telling them that it was not going to accomplish what they wanted, wanted to buy it immediately. Every other consideration, including millions of dollars that we could plausibly help them achieve by non-AI means, was swept aside. It was like a dark and terrible force seized control of their limbs, plunged their hands into their own chests, and presented their still-beating credit cards to us in grim supplication. We were so mortified by the inexplicable shift in energy that we (wisely) declined to take the money and ended the sales process, and soon thereafter removed Cortex from our list of demonstrations.
Thank you for surfacing this article. This makes complete sense, and is nonsensical at the same time. Thankfully, I am getting close to retirement, and I sincerely hope that when the LLM (AI) bubble bursts, there will be enough of an economy to support my pension.
The referenced article is by the author of "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again" and manages a consultancy that helps companies dig out of self-inflicted technology holes.
There's an open pit in the middle of our office plan that drops down into a bunch of very sharp spikes that kill you instantly. This is bad. People keep falling in there and dying. Someone put a sign up, the other day, all bright yellow so you can't miss it, that says "Beware!!! Spikes!!!"
The office immediately split into two factions over it. One says that if anyone falls in the spike pit it's their own fault for being so stupid and not watching where they're walking, so we should remove the sign. The other says that the sign is an insult, there shouldn't be a spike pit in our office at all, and having the sign up like that is just normalising the existence of the spike pit, so we should remove the sign.
We ended up removing the sign. Probably for the better. Still... for a while there it looked like it might have worked...
Nobody has ever been capable of writing a scathingly harsh and well formulated satire about the perils of modern capitalism, that doesn't just get immediately one-upped by some random food service worker talking about their actual week.
like they've already made it very clear by a) ghosting me for months and b) getting my colleagues to train their stupid new ai. like i only know about this because one of my colleagues tipped me off. i imagine they're waiting to get it working before they formally let me go and fuck that. i am literally drafting my resignation lmao
guys. there has been an update. my spy colleague has informed me that my ex-boss is backtracking. the ai was supposed to speed things up because apparently i was unavailable too often but it turns out that another colleague has been lying about me telling him i was unavailable. i have email receipts proving this never happened.
this colleague also has beef with me because his documents were always garbage and i came back with a million corrections and called him out for mass copy-pasting. so he was just skipping the editing and saying i said i couldn't do it. and i lost my job because of it.
shoutout to all the people reblogging the version of this before my rejection letter. and especially shoutout to those people saying they're happy for me and that there's justice on this earth. i regret to inform you that my version of justice means choosing violence.
Time is a flat iron, smooth as fuck
Time is a curler, twisted up
Time is an updo, pinned and tucked
Time is a weave-in, stitched and stuck
Time is organic, shaped by luck
Time is a construct
Monster truck
Saw this on Pinterest but wanted to share bc actually I have had a physio recommend this to me and it’s been amazing!
Walking backwards strengths the muscles around your knee (esp the quadriceps, which you will definitely feel if you do this) but doesn’t put the same strain on the joint as forward walking or running. It’s very good for your balance, coordination and patellar tracking, all important to reduce knee pain, support your knees and can help rehab knee injuries.
I do it on a gym treadmill, usually at 1.2 km/h (but I’ve seen anywhere from 0.8-1.6 km/h recommended, which is like 0.5-1.0 mph for the Americans). You can start with a very slight incline and then slowly increase it 5% as you get more comfortable, and to help engage the muscles. I usually do this for 5 to 10 minutes, 3-4 times a week. My understanding is that you can also do it outside, either on flat or sloped ground, because just walking backwards itself is useful as hell (the incline is just useful to engage muscles more as you get more used to it)
If you have even a spare 20 minutes a week, this is seriously useful to support your knees, because there is nothing worse than injuring one
Bc I know there are many people on this website dealing with chronic pain and disability, I will add some studies below the cut on backwards walking (retro walking) as well. It's been investigated for quite a few things including knee osteoarthritis, lower back pain/instability and also balance improvement for people with hearing impairments, to name a few
Background Previous studies reported the beneficial effects of walking in individual with mild to moderate knee osteoarthritis (OA). The cur
Increased external knee adduction moment during walking alters the joint biomechanics; which causes symptoms in chronic knee osteoarthritis
Background Osteoarthritis (OA) is a chronic, degenerative, inflammatory musculoskeletal dysfunction. It is associated with pain, reduced fun
PDF | Background: Low back pain is the fifth most common reason for physician visits, which affects nearly 60-80% of people throughout their
The Effect of Retro Walking Training on Dynamic Balance in Sedentary Individuals with Hearing Impairment
“there’s a restaurant two miles from my house called—” nope
“today I learned [celeb] went to my high school—” nope nope nope nope nope
these are all real posts I’ve seen on the internet that allowed me to identify a user’s hometown instantly. if it’s a small town, that’s doubly dangerous, because a bad actor could trace you just by a unique first name or selfie you once posted. in an age where doxxing and stalking are some of the worst I’ve ever seen it, you HAVE to think twice about what you’re posting online.
i once saw a 13-year old post an image they noted as being “a few miles from their house.” it had a theater in the shot with a unique enough name to be local. one google maps search, now everyone knew not only what city they lived in, but the possible neighborhoods in that radius too. and they had a HUGE following…who all knew this was a 13-year-old child.
so yeah. not to sound like a 90s internet safety PSA…but I’m gonna be that PSA for a minute.
if you’re posting an image, there is NO need to say that you live there. you could just be traveling. “saw this in Montana” is better than “saw this by my house!”
before you post about a venue, especially a restaurant or small store, check and see if it’s local—CRUCIALLY if it has only one or two locations. people might travel to arenas or convention centers, but they’re far less likely to be traveling to Bartleby’s Fish and Chips. if it’s an anecdote and you still live nearby, you can honestly just leave the name out entirely.
if you’re sharing a news story, it can just be a story you found and wanted to share. you don’t have to clarify “it happened in my town,” because even if you don’t mention your town name, an easily-googled news article will.
if you’re seeing a concert or meeting a celebrity on a tour that’s stopped locally, wait until they’ve hit a few more venues before you post about it, or at the very least wait until you get home. this is honestly a smart move for any event you attend: unless you’re marketing yourself, there’s no need to advertise your location in real time.
check your selfie backgrounds for anything identifying. this includes city names on venues, school names, street signs, and house numbers.
this stuff is flexible if you no longer live in your hometown, or if your city is particularly big, but there’s STILL no reason to tie yourself to your school, your workplace, or your street. you can call it paranoid, but as someone who’s seen my friends get literal death threats over fictional characters before, the last thing I want is someone willing to act on those threats finding out where they live.
Wilson also wrote a 14-post thread on Bluesky about it:
1. It's a fun action movie. A line that got cut but sums up some of my overall feelings: This Odyssey is not a rich, satisfying Homeric banquet, but sometimes in the heat, an ice-cold Philly water ice is all you want - even it's mostly sugar and food coloring, and makes no nutritional sense.
2. Adaptations can do whatever the creators want with the source material, and in many cases, the more they diverge from or push back against the original, the better. e.g. I love Wild Sargasso Sea (and I also love Jane Eyre).
3. It's also totally fine to use American actors and a diverse cast. The costumes/ armor/boats are a mess, but who cares? Homer is also a mishmash, and see point #2.
4. It's less fine to waste your expensive diverse cast by terrible screen-writing, giving them zero convincing characterization or attempt to make us care about the relationships, and tokenism.
5. Adaptations are often most successful when they make clear, courageous choices about what to leave out - so, for instance, the movie "The Return" seems to me both a much more radical departure from the original source, and also a more successful film.
6. Nolan tries to pack a lot of Incidents and Big Ideas into this film, but they do not seem to me to hang together coherently on the level of his own plot and the movie's constructed system of values. Instead, it's foisting a didactic point about Our Times onto the plot without integrating it.
7. The film centers Odysseus's guilt over his war crimes, but never shows us the POV of his victims, and instead glorifies the perpetrator for feeling bad about himself. I found this unsatisfying ethically and worse, imaginatively, because Damon's character is given only one moo
7. I liked Nolan's low-budget early films - have seen Memento 3 times - but I think the money is a trap. It's easier to suspend disbelief if the actors are less famous. The huge budget leads him to attempt grand jam-packed epics, when he's better at taut, very premise-y small films.
8. I wish I liked this film more. I tried very hard to like it. I also felt it was valid to write about why it didn't work for me - especially since so much of the coverage has been so very positive, and I'm hardly punching down.
9. By far my favorite thing in the film is Robert Pattinson's hilarious and sexy Antinous. If anyone ever wants to make a spin off TV series with Antinous risen from the dead to mess with other mythical households, I would be so there for it.
10. Whatever one thinks of the film as a work of art, it's doing some good in the world, by generating big conversations, bringing new audiences to the cinema, and new readers to ancient literature. I hope it helps save the humanities.
11. Was I too mean? Or not mean enough? I went through my first draft and tried to take out the snark. To quote the great poet: "Though much is taken, much remains... That which we are, we are."
12. Beyond anything about the film as a film, it was a terrible and entirely unnecessary choice to film the Trojan Horse sequence in occupied Dakhla, Western Sahara, without the consent of the indigenous population.
Yes, it is Wide Sargasso Sea and yes, the Tennyson line is “though much is taken, much abides”. Many apologies and thank you for correcting. And thank you to all who read and engaged. I am very happy that some people respectfully disagreed with me, or had different feelings about the film from mine.
Saying “this niche, properly tagged, warned, and rated piece of fiction could theoretically hurt someone” is not a good argument. This properly labeled cookie with the allergen information at the bottom that contains gluten could theoretically harm me very badly, but only if I consume it. Tags are like nutrition labels, and warnings are like allergy information. If you know you have an allergy to something, the logic is to stay away from it. It is the same with fiction. I’m not running through stores yelling at people to take all the products with gluten off the shelves just because it could hurt me. Instead I ignore it and go to the gluten free section and find cookies that are right for me. And if running through a grocery store yelling sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is. Stop doing the same with fiction.
And just like with food, what might be harmful for one person to consume could be quite *beneficial* for others. One man’s trigger is another man’s catharsis.
AND if you lack the maturity/self control/awareness to stop yourself from eating things that could potentially harm you, you either 1) are too young to be making your own food choices and should be supervised by a parent/other adult who is supposed to be responsible for you (and the store clerk who put the food on the shelf is NOT) or 2) need to take accountability for your own actions, because if you deliberately consumed something you knew could hurt you as a fully autonomous adult, then you really have no one to blame but yourself.
I’d like to add that within AO3, “Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings” is, in this food analogy, like the food labels that read “This product was manufactured in a facility where [potential food allergens] are used in the production of some products”. It’s not telling you they’re in there, but even more importantly, it’s not telling you they’re not. This is not the same as “No Archive Warnings Apply” which would be the certified [food allergen] free food. One guarantees a certain experience, the other has given you no promises as to what may or may not be included and is very much a consume-at-your-own-risk product.
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“The police spend very little of their time dealing with violent criminals—indeed, police sociologists report that only about 10% of the average police officer’s time is devoted to criminal matters of any kind. Most of the remaining 90% is spent dealing with infractions of various administrative codes and regulations: all those rules about how and where one can eat, drink, smoke, sell, sit, walk, and drive. If two people punch each other, or even draw a knife on each other, police are unlikely to get involved. Drive down the street in a car without license plates, on the other hand, and the authorities will show up instantly, threatening all sorts of dire consequences if you don’t do exactly what they tell you. The police, then, are essentially just bureaucrats with weapons. Their main role in society is to bring the threat of physical force—even, death—into situations where it would never have been otherwise invoked, such as the enforcement of civic ordinances about the sale of untaxed cigarettes.”
— An excerpt from Ferguson & the Criminalization of American Life by David Graeber (via actjustly)
since i think many will have had the memory slip with just how many other atrocities have occured in the past 11 years, or are simply too young to remember, the last bit about the sale of untaxed cigarettes isn’t just some hypothetical, it’s a reference to the killing of eric garner
this is the origin of the slogan “i cant breathe”, which was revived in the wake of the killing of george floyd.
It lets people access scientific articles for free. This is dangerous. It helps the free flow of knowledge and reduces the competitive edge of all the people who worked really hard to have been born into a wealth.
Like, it’s literally a website where you can type in the DOI of an article and read it, without ever having to pay the publisher who exploited the author.
So, again, do not, under any circumstance, use Sci-Hub. I mean, can you imagine a world where knowledge is free and easily accessible to everyone? Even, y'know, poor people?
Libgen also has many books online, including textbooks, searchable by name, author, and ISBN. Can you imagine textbook companies not getting their hard-earned income from poor college students? Here is the link just so you make sure that you never accidentally stumble across this horrible, unethical website.
Oh, and while we’re talking about books, if you’ve managed to stay clear from Libgen, definitely don’t go to zlibrary, where you can also find a lot of textbooks, but unfortunately they’re completely free.
Another inside tip from academia: Those papers in really expensive journals that are effectively inaccessible to anyone not in a university network? Depending on the discipline it’s very likely that same paper is on a “preprint” server somewhere, with no access restrictions.
Like if you want to read basically any physics, math, or CS paper, arXiv.org will have you covered, because everyone uploads their papers there before submitting to a journal (and generally updates it after peer review). I know all of my papers are on there. This is such common practice that journals have it baked into their licensing agreements that authors retain the right to upload their work to these places.
So the next time you get hit with that paywall, you may not even need sci-hub, just click the arxiv link on google scholar instead.
if for some reason none of this works, the old “send a email nicely asking for the paper to the author” is always a good trick. remember most scientists hate the commercialisation of scientific knowledge
Many authors of papers are on ResearchGate! You can ask for papers there, if they don’t just post a copy to download. If they’re associated with a college, you can usually find their email addresses in the department directory, also.
The backlash was a major lawsuit from 9 tribes alongside other lawsuits from advocacy groups like NDN Collective. You can support NDN Collective by donating to them here.
That’s Louis Rossman, a repair technician and YouTuber, who went viral recently for railing against Apple. Apple purposely charges a lot for repairs and you either have to pay up or buy a new device. That’s because Apple withholds necessary tools and information from outside repair shops. And to think, we were just so close to change.
This guy inspired me to repair my own macbook. First of all, you should know that I am not… like, I have to look up HOW to look up what my computer specifications are. Tech, that ware either soft or hard, is not a subject in which I experience comfort or competence.
But my puppy peed on my keyboard, and I asked the apple store, or the fucking mac cafe, or the godsdamn Computer House Chill Zone or whatever cute ass name they have for their bullshit store, and they said it would be TWELVE HUNDRED DOLLARS TO REPLACE MY KEYBOARD. I’m not even exaggerating.
So I asked the internet, well how hard IS it to repair? And I saw this guy’s video, and while I am no techie, I AM fueled by spite, so I was all “oh, they do that shit on purpose specifically so they can charge me $1200 bucks or make me buy a new computer hunh? FUCK THEM” and I bought all the tools I needed for about $25 and I bought all the parts I needed for about another $25 and I watched a few tutorial videos, and I replaced my own keyboard.
So, once you are doing the actual deed, it becomes pretty obvious that they are finding creative ways to make this much harder than it has to be on purpose. On thing that stood out to me is, instead of all the tiny screws being the same size, there are about two dozen very slightly different sizes. They could easily be all the same size, or like, two sizes at most, but no.
These mother fuckers will take a panel that screws into place and they’ll use a different size screw for each corner. They are so close that you almost cannot tell them apart visually, but they each will only screw into the matching corner. Like, it’s a pretty clear “fuck you” to anyone trying to do repairs.
anyway, this guy is also fueled by spite, and doing holy work, and I have mad respect
ifixit also makes kits and instruction for nearly every part for consoles, computers, phones, tablets, just about anything. We’ve replaced multiple parts on our old 3Dses at this point. It’s not nearly as hard as you might assume and very worth it to learn how to repair your own electronics.
prguitarman
germansingergirl
areudirty
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
romaincrisis
dailybridgerton
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