ImpureTale

Editor and English Professor | NB/Genderfluid | She/Her | White

[k-dhd]

[crystaltoa]

Even saying ”I’m so sorry, I completely forgot” sounds marginally better than ” I’m so sorry, I didn’t completely forget, I actually completely remembered. I thought about it the whole time and it stressed me out so much my brain built an insurmountable wall around it.”

[halfabouros]

It takes so much mental fortitude to remember to pick up that sock

[angrylittlesliceofpizza]

"i thought about that task so much my brain apparently decided i had already done it" also sounds like bullshit, AND YET

[big-smiling-monkey]

“It didn’t happen, and I don’t know why. It could have. It should have. My life would be vastly improved if it had. I thought about it constantly and obsessively… and yet here we are.”

[the-semicolonoscopy]

It’s Pride Month Eve, so leave out some milk for Freddie Mercury and his cats.

[cipheramnesia]

They’re looking at each other, comparing cats:

[cipheramnesia]

And Vincent Price was also bi so, y'know, let’s hear it for the bi pride catboys.

[babyjanedough]

Already know I wanna send this to people on June 1

[isuckattechnology]

Audio:

Erika, referencing ebenezer scrooge: You, boy! What day is it?!

Brennan, as a young boy: It's Pride, bitch!

[ororium-z]

Happy Pride!

[socialistexan]

Same exact playbook, down to the "but it was based on a lie."

[socialistexan]

It's kind of amazing how much this is the identical strategy. Focusing on the distress and harm of parents over the trans or autistic person themselves. Pathologizing the condition treating it as an epidemic, including calling it a social contagion causing a worrying "explosion" of diagnosis because it is "trendy."

Ignoring the experts on the subject while also appealing to "common sense" and dismissing all research that contradicts them while also appealing to "basic science."

Plus it's all the same quacks and actors behind previous medical and social moral panics saying them same things in the same ways and no one seems to acknowledge that.

[demonprincex]

she says in the article that she was inspired to think this way about autism after she started reporting on detransitioners. Her Twitter mentions are filled with prominent voices in the detrans terf movement. This isn't just similar, It is quite self-consciously an extension of the same movement.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

idk man I'm thinking a lot about the discourse being reported in this post and my own post about crushes, which has garnered a lot of responses like this one

and I don't know exactly what to do with this yet but I'm fascinated, in a really upsetting way, by the way some of these people seem to conceptualize romantic and/or sexual attraction as an act of violation that no one should do to people they like and care about. if nothing else it raises some really compelling questions about what they think actually goes on between people who have sex and/or romantic bonds with each other if that's not supposed to be something that happens between friends.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

normal stuff happening in the replies

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

oh my god I'm doing patriarchy now

[iwhumpyou]

rewatched the entire PoTC trilogy on an international flight and I can't believe I forgot how funny it is.

Barbossa is the most exasperated character in any scene he's in, unless he's winning. then he's the smuggest son of a bitch on screen (he literally returns from the dead smugly eating an apple). but majority of the time, he's 'why am I the only adult here'. man rolls his eyes so much I half-expected him to turn straight to the camera.

when Will asks Elizabeth to marry him while they are fighting Davy Jones' crew, stuck in a maelstrom, and trapped in the final battle, the first word out of her mouth is "Barbossa!". she then continues by asking Barbossa to marry them, but for a split second Will's face goes like 'Barbossa? Barbossa?? I didn't even know he was on the map of this convoluted love quadrangle!'

when they're in Singapore and Sao Feng threatens the spy he found and Will, Elizabeth, and Barbossa all look at each other to confirm that none of them have snuck in a spy they forgot to tell the others about, before shrugging and telling Sao Feng to go ahead and kill him.

Barbossa's eyes just getting wide and wider the more weapons Elizabeth pulls out of her clothes. c'mon man, let a woman have her toys!

rewatching really gives you the full picture of how many people are scheming at any given time and how each person's schemes intersect with the others, even if they're nominally on the same side. everyone also gets So Upset when their scheme is foiled, accidentally or intentionally, by someone else's scheme, as though they themselves aren't scheming at that very moment.

Barbossa's iron balls. I'm sorry, this is the funniest dick joke in the trilogy that defines how many dick jokes Disney can stick in a movie before it stops being PG-13. Jack's reaction really says it all.

rereading this list I see it's quite heavily tilted in favor of Barbossa which I now realize is because I empathize with Barbossa way more than I did as a kid. I too am frustrated to be surrounded by idiots while I'm the only adult around. man just wants to eat his apple in peace goddammit. so he did a little mutiny and maybe some more murder and mayhem and also maybe unleashed a pagan god upon the world. the guy really likes his apples, is that a crime?!?

[daysleftofsecondterm]

Tried to reblog this post:

but Tumblr refused to let me for some reason.

Anyway, I’ll just show you what I tried to write here:

[thatoddboy]

Also, this is not a hypothetical.

This is a real scenario that is happening now

[daysleftofsecondterm]

Which is why people whose brains literally cannot let them lie need a way to hack the meat computer to keep people alive

[asterronaut]

just coworker things ❤️

[aichu-dechu]

[theconcealedweapon]

[maarvarq]

Always bear in mind that there is absolutely no legitimate evidence that Luigi was actually the one who killed the insurance company guy.

[theconcealedweapon]

Of course he wasn't. He was at a party with me that day.

[tiny-space-whale]

No but like literally, actually. All bits aside.

He didn't do it.

The cops very clearly planted evidence on him because they had to make an arrest because all eyes were on them and whoever actually did the deed was making them look stupid.

Why would the real killer hero have kept the weapon on his person and traveled two states over while carrying it and a manifesto in his bag, conveniently turning the crime into a federal matter? The same guy whose bag they found in a park, filled with monopoly money? Why did the police turn off their bodycams, take Luigi's stuff, drive a block away, turn their bodycams back on, go back into the restaurant, and then arrest him?

From the moment of his arrest, even left-of-center media has been presuming his guilt without examining anything (e.g. calling him "the killer" instead of "alleged" or "accused") and then when I say he didn't do it, the nearest person chimes in with some quip that tells me they think he did do it but should go free anyway. Don't get me wrong, I would have the same attitude if he had done it. But he didn't. It makes me feel like the only sane person in the world, even among my staunchly leftist friends.

[cephalopodvictorious]

Because most of you probably haven't heard - the judge agreed that his backpack wasn't sufficiently in his control, and some (not all) of the "evidence" from it must be suppressed

Judge blocks evidence from Luigi Mangione backpack in UnitedHealthcare CEO murder case

Luigi Mangione was apprehended by police in a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania, days after the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thom

[sirfrogsworth]

Scrolling the timeline on Mother's Day can be hard for me so last year I decided to turn my grief into something positive.

This year, I decided to make it a tradition.

I noticed people were posting a lot of old, degraded photos of their parents. So I try to pick a few good candidates to restore.

I spent a couple of years learning how to do this. I am very good at it. And I really enjoy it. But I learned it isn't very lucrative and most people are fine with what AI can do now.

It makes me a bit sad, but I actually think restoring people's precious memories is not the worst use of AI. Plus, I use several AI tools in my workflow. When there is extensive damage, generative fill is a lifesaver. The remove tool makes quick work of stubborn accumulated dust. And AI upscaling makes the photos printable, often at many times their original size.

My restorations are still much better than the free AI ones. I edit them with a precision and fidelity that can hold up to 400% magnification. I take special care to preserve likenesses and often work with reference photos to make sure people's loved ones still look like who they are after upscaling. I also do colorizing by hand (though I will sometimes make initial color maps with AI). I color grade using film stock color references so the photos still look like film, and I add texture and grain selectively to keep people from looking like smooth rubber.

But that kind of quality takes so much time. One photo is probably several hundred dollars of labor. And no one is willing to pay that so I have to charge below minimum wage.

I will probably just do pro bono restorations from here on out. Focus on fixing photos that AI isn't very good at restoring. Plus I have a ton of family photos that I want to restore for my niece. At some point, years from now, she'll be old enough to talk to me without my brother's permission. And she'll probably want to know who her grandparents were. I hope to be ready with photos and stories by that time.

In any case, it felt nice to do this on a hard day. And it helped clarify to myself how I should use this skill I've developed going forward.

Before and afters...

[thefrogman]

Some of the most difficult restorations I've done...

I've had to deal with intense color casts before, but never a green one. Thankfully, the original color was still in the data, but figuring out how to filter out the bad green and keep the good green required a lot of problem-solving.

The original was actually in really good shape and had a lot of detail. But there were just so many people in the photo and they all needed individual exposure correction on their faces. And I colored everything manually. I think this ended up being over 400 layers by the end.

For this one, the car was completely blown out and had no data. But I posted it in a bunch of vintage car forums and was able to identify the make and model. I replaced the blown out car with a better photo of the exact same model from the same year. Then I researched what paint color options were available and matched that as well.

This is one where folks might assume I used AI, but aside from my upscaling tool, I actually did this with traditional compositing techniques. It is probably one of the most damaged photos I've been able to save.

Her facial likeness was completely destroyed.

However, I restored this other photo of her.

And I was able to use it as a reference to restore her likeness in the lake photo.

It doesn't hold up as well as I'd like at this magnification, but considering how damaged it was, I am pretty happy with the result. And I think I was able to make it look like her again.

One might think photo restoration is only about saving really old photos, but I have fixed modern wedding photos that were taken in bad light and I regularly use these skills to fix smartphone photos.

My phone is getting old and is in bad shape. The back fell off and I keep it together with a case. And the lenses are unprotected and hard to clean. So all of my photos look a bit hazy now. But sometimes it is all I have to capture a moment. So I take photos and hope my editing magic can fix them.

I took this out my front window on a foggy morning.

I actually got a court summons for having that chair in my front yard.

It's a long story.

And I just had a visit from a foxy friend the other day.

My neighbor says he sees this fella all the time. So I feel like he needs a name. Otis's favorite toy was a stuffed red fox, so I'm thinking maybe I'll call him Milo.

[thevanillahorizon]

OP, I would understand very little of your magic so I will not ask on that, but I DO want to hear about the court summons.

[thefrogman]

I am going through a very long and difficult health recovery. And I have this heart thing that makes me very weak if I exert myself too much. I was trying to take this old red chair to the end of my driveway for trash pickup, but my heart started beating way too fast, and I only dragged it halfway.

So I just left the chair in my yard.

It rained soon after and I realized this pleather chair was waterproof. It shrugged off the rain and was perfectly fine. I then sat in the chair and it was a comfortable place to sit outside and relax.

So I left the chair where it was.

I can't leave the house much, so I have to find photographic opportunities close by. I eventually started incorporating the chair into my photography.

This thing was nigh invulnerable. No season was able to damage it.

And I did a fun Halloween bit with it.

It was in my yard for over a year, bothering no one.

But then I got a warning letter in the mail. The county inspector claimed I had "rubbish" in my yard and I had to remove it. I'm suspicious that a neighbor tattled on me.

I am making a lot of progress with my health. But I am at a stage where I have to get worse to get better. So I am currently bed bound most days. I have very few good days where I could move a big red chair.

It took me a few weeks, but as soon as I had a good day, I dragged the chair back into my garage and out of sight.

But it was not soon enough.

The inspector referred me to the court and I got a summons for not complying.

So now I have to appear before a judge and explain why I had a chair in my front yard.

I'm hoping they will accommodate my disability and let me do it over a zoom call. This all feels like a silly waste of time. I have neighbors with old cars on their lawn. I keep my lawn maintained and others let it grow two feet high.

But I got dinged for having a comfy chair in my yard.

[exxos-von-steamboldt]

[delicatefury]

I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.

And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.

So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.

The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.

Thank God someone bothered to check.

[json-derulo]

I have a wild idea. what if we supported our claims of fact by linking to a reliable source. better yet, what if we went hogwild and just straight up linked to the actual unpaywalled study

[thestuffedalligator]

"Um," said the fairy. "Choose something else."

Rosamund hesitated. It was, she had to admit, the first time she had ever been given a wish, so she wasn't an expert with this sort of thing, but she felt that this was not part of the typical script. "Sorry," she said. "Is that not allowed?"

The fairy grimaced. When it spoke, its voice came out pained and stressed. "Y-y-y-e-e-e-no," it sighed at last, dragonfly wings sagging. "No, technically no, it's not not allowed, but-" It suddenly brightened. "How about gold? Can't go wrong with gold. Gold's a good wish."

Rosamund frowned. This was really not going the way she expected at all. "Excuse me-"

"Beauty, that's a good one too, beauty's always popular," it went on. "And if there's a ball nearby tonight I can probably-"

"Excuse me!"

The wand was twiddled in chitinous fingers. "Right," the fairy said, sounding scolded. "Sorry, it's just..." Its voice trailed off.

Her grandmother's clock chimed midnight from the mantelpiece.

Then - "I'm sorry," it said, not daring to look up, "I know it's not fair, but - you know what I am. You know what we do to wishes. If you wished for wealth I'd have to turn your hair into silver, so you’d have to tear every strand out of your head before you could spend it. We can't help it. It's what we do. The cost of a wish is that you get what you want, but you don't get it the easy way.

"So if you wish for a child, it'll be - strange. Twisted, somehow. Made of pine or marzipan or have the head of a hedgehog. That's the cost of a wish-child; you'll get the child you wished for, but it'll never be - right."

Rosamund waited to see if there was anything else. She felt a sting to her pride when she realized there wasn't. "Is that all?" she said. "I wouldn't care what I got-"

"You all say that," the fairy said. "You all say you wouldn't care what you got. You all say it, and you really believe it, until the neighbours sneer at you and your hedgehog child for too long, or your back aches because your thumb-high child can't help you in the fields, or your pine child kicks and bites and won't obey, and then you think, 'This isn't the way it was supposed to be,' and then..."

The fairy stopped and looked into Rosamund’s eyes. It was a beautiful thing, all glittering carapace and iridescent wings, but just for an instant it looked terribly, terribly old.

"I'm sorry," it said. "But I'm tired of making unloved children."

[caffeinewitchcraft]

That hit my hurt like a freight train, what an amazing perspective

Of course now I want Rosamund, realizing that there are already children out in the world ready tk be loved, to go out on a quest to find them and makes the fairy come along with her as a guide by refusing to change her wish unless they help her find them all. And then at the end, after she has gathered all her wonderful and unique and, yes, strange children, she wishes for a big house they can all live in

And the fae grants it with a twist - they may all live there but the fae will live alongside them and the house will always be little strange with expanding rooms and extra seats at the table for uninvited guests who almost always become one of Rosamund's children too

[spicymancer]

Lock Blocked with Monster Researcher Eclair

[helenvaughans]

"crime" for conservatives is basically just existing in public as a person of color

[dragon-in-a-fez]

always thinking about that Oxford study that found half of adults define "young people hanging around in groups" as "anti-social behaviour"

[stantler-and-walrein]

>"anti-social behaviour"

>looks inside

>socialising

[sparklejamesysparkle]

“𝐒𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐬𝐚𝐢𝐝: ‘𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐧𝐥𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐛𝐞 𝐥𝐞𝐟𝐭 𝐚𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐚 𝐧𝐮𝐜𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐜𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐂𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐜𝐨𝐜𝐤𝐫𝐨𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐬.’ 𝐈 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭'𝐬 𝐟𝐮𝐧𝐧𝐲, 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐞, 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰, 𝐈 𝐚𝐦 𝐚 𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐯𝐨𝐫. 𝐈 𝐝𝐨𝐧'𝐭 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐩 𝐭𝐫𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠. 𝐈 𝐦𝐞𝐚𝐧, 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐞𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐨𝐫 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐝𝐨𝐧'𝐭, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐈 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐝𝐨𝐧'𝐭 𝐟𝐞𝐞𝐥 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐧𝐨𝐭.” Happy birthday to Oscar, Grammy, Emmy, and Golden Globe winning entertainment legend and style icon Cher, born on May 20th, 1946 in El Centro, California. 💗 Gifs of Cher wearing gowns designed by Bob Mackie from the Cher variety series, originally broadcast by CBS in 1975 and 1976.