Jasper's Wandering Dream @jasper-dreams - Tumblr Blog

Jack Gaughan, cover art for "Masters of the Vortex" by Doc E.E. Smith, 1968

If you are currently sitting or laying down this moment ask yourself if you are resting or rotting. Change your behavior accordingly

lakemojave

There is no romance in decay when the decaying is easy

lakemojave

You are naught but pawns in my game

b00tlegf4g

I hope some of y'all take this as a sign to rest intentionally too.

if you're "resting" but thinking of all the things you have to do, that's not resting, that's rotting. Even if you haven't done anything all day, give yourself some time to rest and truly relax. When you let yourself relax guilt free, you actually regain energy for your responsibilities.

nonbinary-octopus

this post has helped me a number of times since I first saw it. I have realized I was rotting instead of resting, and depending on the circumstance, got up to do something, or settled more comfortably to actually rest.

Thank you.

g1sunstreaker

"rot or rest" sounds like the world's worst game show

himekokosu

Dahlia

susancat

The Stars are falling - Remix

I was never quite happy with how the track turned out, so with almost a year distance and some more knowledge about audio production, I was able to make it a lot more alive and in-your-face.

Enjoy!

xanaxfarts

Japanese Wisteria (Wisteria floribunda 'Alba')

lilyfoxis

Illustration for Goethe's 'Faust' by Harry Clarke, 1925.

damazcuz

How did you get hacked?

I tried to pirate a game and did so wrong.

The thing about hackers, scammers, fraudsters-- is that they cast a very wide net knowing they'll get a few suckers caught in it. Let's say 10,000 people get an email saying "YOÜVE W0N!🤩 CLiCK N⁰W!?!" 9,997 of them delete it. For the three people who get sucked in, it's life ruining.

They rely on the fact that, at some point, they are going to get you while you're not thinking clearly. Maybe you're sick. Or tired. Or work is stressful. Or you just had a fight with someone and you're mad. Your kid is going through something, your dog is at the vet, your car broke down, you got fired. Or you're in the middle of planning a big event, or you're so super excited for a convention-- and something comes across your desk. Maybe it's an email, or a phone call, a link, a text, a file. But for whatever reason you're not thinking 100% clearly and you don't question it, you trust for a minute and that's all that they need. You are now one of those three caught in the net.

And now you're actually on their list of suckers! They will return to you over and over and over and over again for more, because hey! You fell for it once. They're counting on that your grandma who answered a scam call and provided her credit card number once WILL be scammable again. Maybe not right away, maybe not the same way, but they'll get her. (And more often than not, they're right.)

I think most people are inclined to want to trust one another. Or sometimes we're curious. Or we think, "Wow, I didn't know it would be this easy!" not stopping to ask WHY it's so easy to get something good for free.

I work at a financial institution and I help people all the time who have been hacked and lost hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars. They are always terrified- will I get my money back? Am I safe?- but they are also consistently ashamed and embarrassed. They feel guilty for having trusted and for not having stopped to think for a second longer. They verbally berate themselves. "I'm so stupid. How could I have fallen for it?"

Currently I'm only out about $300, which I'm being told I'll get back. That number could go up-- I'm still working on securing everything. Do you know how many passwords I had stored in my browser? 192. I have no idea how many of those had a valid card attached, but so far one account was plenty to steal a couple hundred bucks from me. And I do feel stupid, and embarrassed, ashamed, humiliated. Scared. The hacker messaged everyone I had recently messaged on discord as well as every channel in every server to @/everyone with instructions to download their Spyware. Every single person I talk to knows I fell for something dumb.

It's embarrassing, it's upsetting, and I dont even know the full scope of what more is going to happen. I had tax documents on my computer-- how much of my identity is now in their hands? I've locked my credit and placed fraud alerts everywhere, but how safe am I? Who else is at risk now because of me? What other files do they have from me?

In this case, I happen to know that a number of people did what I did. I've seen a number of threads from others who ALSO tried to download tomodachi life from github. (For the record, this was not the floralith link.) I was excited, I was in a hurry. I thought, "this is so quick and easy and now I can play!" I didnt question why in the hell it would EVER be so easy. I haven't had a virus on my computer since I was a young teen, and then I went and installed a bunch of Trojans whilst going "la la la." Incredibly stupid stuff.

But that's the thing, these people are constantly TRYING to catch someone, anyone, YOU, and they count on that eventually, EVENTUALLY, someday they'll dangle just the right bait for you to latch on to. And in my case it was a fishy video game download.

kerink

it is INCREDIBLY easy to get scammed. no matter how safe or smart you think you are. you are more likely to get scammed than not.

i almost did this exact same thing in january of this year. i'd just applied for SSA disability and a day or two after i got an legitimate looking email saying they needed additional documents. i check my email first thing in the morning so i was physically tired and stressed in every way possible and in pain from still being post-surgical and i was scared of screwing up this process.

i downloaded the attached file. the only thing that saved me was my computer asking if i was sure i wanted to run this program.

what program? i thought this was a pdf?

no. turns out the icon was a pdf but the file type was something i wasn't familiar with.

i went back to the email and sure enough the sender was some stupid gibberish.

i dodged a bullet by an unspeakably slim margin. it terrifies me how legit the email had looked, it was properly formatted with correct spelling and grammar and had all the right logos and headers and it went to my focused inbox. this was not designed to filter people out. it terrifies me how they even knew i'd just applied and to try this.

i've had friends who've lost thousands to scams that got them at the wrong time.

it doesn't matter who you are, how protected you feel, how many defenses you've got in place, how locked down your shit seems, they will get you. it may not ruin your life, but in some way to some degree you will get got.

harperhug

You (and I) are not immune to social engineering.

jasper-dreams

This. Is bullshit. Gonna be cold hearted here, but you guys are being chumps.

Make a mistake? Eh. No big deal, everyone does. But /learn/ from it, and stop with the maudlin "bla bla nobody is immune to social engineering" -- as if there's nothing you can do.

There's a very simple way to evade this sort of scam, same way I learned when I was first on the internet in '91, when the scam was already old --

Fucking never respond to anything directly, even from people you know. Always go find whatever it is yourself.

Same thing goes for phone calls, which were the mechanism for the original Social Engineering scam (e.g. Kevin Mitnick). Someone calls you, saying bla bla bla they're with your bank or your insurance or the IRS or collections or the feds or whatever? Nope! Hang up, figure out a way that /you/ contact /them/. If it's serious, go talk in person.

This kind of con is called a "Confidence Scheme" and has been around long before the internet. Such scams all rely upon you not taking precautions - and the precautions are simple, same now as they were a hundred years ago. Don't have reckless confidence in strangers that come ask you for something.

Now, this won't protect you from fraud like identity theft, and there are plenty of risks that are indeed hard to avoid completely and require more complex precaution. Say, getting hacked via a software flaw.

But Confidence Scams? Those only hit suckers, and you can easily learn not to be a sucker.

himekokosu

Roses

bacontoktok

cellarspider

May I present to you Wheel Running In the Wild, a published research paper that delights me to no end:

This paper intended to test whether would mice would run on a wheel if they found one, to try and determine if this was a natural behavior or a stress response in captivity. They put a wheel in a protected little box with a camera that took pictures any time the wheel turned, and tallied up how often it was used by what.

Mice were, happily, the most common users of the wheel, and their patterns of use indicated they were doing so voluntarily once they figured it out.

But the second most common users.

Those were slugs.

lesbianshepard

honey is the only food product that never spoils. there are pots of honey that are over five thousand years old and still completely edible

lesbianshepard

i also want to point out we know it tastes the same even after thousands of years b/c archaeologists who discovered two thousand year old honey tasted it. presumably right after they looked at each other and went “what the hell here goes nothing”

celtic-pyro-deactivated20230725

key--lime--pie

I’m pretty sure they also identify human remains by taste. Archaeologists are straight up freaks.

notaflippinmermaid

No, no no… you identify bone from rock or other substances by touching it to your tongue. If it sticks, it’s bone. The taste itself has nothing to do with it. And most archaeologists won’t lick human bones if they know they’re human.

…and I realize that doesn’t actually do much to prove archaeologists aren’t freaks.