Kaleidoscope of Randomness

A sideblog for random, non-fandom related things, such as history, politics, all things to do with writing, etc. Runs mostly from a queue. Main blog

[pankendev]

there are places in the world today that are experiencing 40°C for the first time in recorded history. of course there's no way to know whether chucking billionaires into volcanos will appease the sun god but i feel we're doing the scientific method a disservice if we don't at least try

[insert-witty-user-name-here]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

[scooplery]

"it's just growing pains" -> "you're too young for that to hurt that bad" -> "you just need to get in better shape" -> "welcome to being old, everyone is in pain"

[infectiouspiss]

disabled ppl we need to start lying to nosy people okay? you tell me i'm too young to need a cane and i will tell you point blank that maybe you should tell that to the guy who ran me over. you don't get an explanation of my health issues you get lies and depending on how much of an asshole i want to be that lie will be anything from a humble car crash to a 1 billion lions attack. mind yr business.

[infectiouspiss]

"i could never live like that" well maybe you'll have to because this happened overnight. yeah you heard me i was the most able bodied man in the world but then one morning bam i woke up disabled. yeah you could have that too. there's no cure either you'll just wake up one morning and now you have to live like me

[infectiouspiss]

"what happened" well have you ever seen looney tunes? yeah an anvil landed on me and squished me flat.

[whyenn-reader]

ADHD advice from non-ADHD people: start blocking out your day and put things in your google calendar

ADHD advice from ADHD people: any time you're waiting for your food to microwave YOU HAVE TO WASH DISHES WASH AS MANY AS YOU CAN THIS IS A RACE AGAINST TIME THIS IS THE ONLY TIME THIS COULD HAPPEN

[liberalsarecool]

The bubble is nigh.

[shinraalpha]

i do think lobbying for data centres over climate goals should be considered a crime against humanity btw

[starlightxraven]

Nobody needs AI to search the Internet, court says in ruling against Google

Google AI Overview court loss in Germany could spell doom for AI search industry.

[appalachian-werewolf]

"Google AI Overview court loss in Germany could spell doom for AI search industry."

It fucking better.

[mrsjdavis]

Like to charge, reblog to cast?

[newbarktownalumni]

[tavyliasin]

The SpamBots Are Migrating From AO3

WARNING - The attached images contain mature language referring to the content of explicit fanfic. 18+ only.

So I had a message on Discord the other day from a stranger. To me, this could be anything from someone contacting me about an event I'm running or a genuine person who found my contact details listed on AO3 or my Carrd site.

But it sounded exactly like a spam/scam bot, so I'm going to share the conversation here with you all both for amusement and as a good list of warning signs to look out for when receiving messages like these!

All images contain Alt Text for those who cannot read from the image.

Also please note, that is just the display name of the user not their Discord username. Please do not attempt to contact anyone with that username.

The red flags: the opening is very generic and then they didn't mention which work they read. Personally if I was contacting someone about a fic I loved so much I wanted to talk directly, I'd mention it right away.

Next, the question is very generic. The piece they're referring to is part of a series, and it's very very easy to see the series started a couple of years ago.

More below the cut! And it gets spicy as I decided to humour the scammer and see how far it would go, because that work is about 75% explicit sex.

So here you can see I'm keeping my responses incredibly dry, because I can tell this is bullshit and I'm just waiting for the line to drop. You know the one - "I want to draw something from your fic" - and I'm just itching to bring up the actual contents of the fic because only the first few thousand words are SFW.

Bless the scammer they really think they have me on the hook with continued messages, but I'm not having it. Notice how they ignored me asking to see these supposed messages and reviews on my works.

Then that actual part where they talk about it? That's a two sentence summary that's included in the first part of the fic, very typical of an AI generated response. Essentially, they fed the text to the bot and told it to give them details about it.

Now here I realise I have them close to where I want to pull out the actual details of the fic, but because it's explicit, I checked their supposed age first. If they were under 18 that would be an immediate halt - "my works are not appropriate for your age group and it is not appropriate for us to discuss them, I'm blocking you now please do not contact authors of mature or explicit rated works in the future"

But they kept going, thinking they were forming a genuine bond here.

Here's what we've been waiting for, of course they're an "artist"

I actually ended up leaving this on read for 12 hours, I wanted to write and I was curious if they'd just push it further on their own or not.

So here we go, here's the art. I reverse image searched and they came up with nothing so if they're stolen I can't find the source, if they're genuine then this "artist" doesn't have any online portfolio or social media presence which is very unusual for an artist.

Also notice the red flag that the signature does not match the username they're contacting me with.

I don't know if these are AI generated, genuine, stolen, or something else, but the messages remain suspicious.

And anyone waiting for the bingo? There it is - "I have an idea about your story for illustration"

This is the typical line, doesn't specify the scene, doesn't give any other details, and this is what the scammer will generally use to start "work" on the piece then demand payment from the writer. Or they'll guilt trip the writer with a sob story about how they're desperate for money for a pet/illness/family member/education/etc etc. They prey on kindness and people who struggle to say no in the face of pressure.

And this, friends, is where I pull out what I've been waiting for all along.

This would not be a surprise to anyone who read the fic or even just read the tags to be honest. It's all right there. I'm also not lying, I'm proud of those scenes.

Again, not exaggerating, and hilarious that they're taking the bait and asking for more details on the scene after sounding horrified about the graphic sexual content. So we can assume that many of these replies are also from AI of some kind.

So these "ideas" are very clearly AI based, because the sky isn't dark, Raphael isn't just "disguised" he's completely changed his face, body, and outfit so it would be pointless to try and show him in that scene. The balcony is also in the Boudoir, and they don't stand out there brooding looking lonely either.

So I brought it back around to push it again, but of course if anyone wants to draw a piece inspired by my works genuinely they're more than welcome to do so.

The finale gets a little anticlimactic but I was bored of dealing with an obvious scammer so we are rounding it out now:

So there you have it, after sending the last message I hit that block button and went back to doing useful things with my time, but maybe I put them off trying with other explicit writers, took up time they could've spent on people who may have fallen for it, and hopefully this can serve as a good example of what scammers look like when they contact you out of the blue.

They've tried this shit on AO3 itself, on Discord, and on Tumblr too.

Be aware of the red flags, and if someone is being really vague on the details that's a huge red flag.

If in doubt, get a second opinion!

Stay safe from scammers 💙

[elemental-queen-writes]

I had one message me. They joined a friends server, and this is how they opened.

Notice I also give rather short non-descript answers? And they seem to be following a script?

I knew the next question would be about art commissions.

And it was.

Gave an ambiguous answer, took screenshots, and let my friends know.

A week later, I get the last message.

Pushy scammers are everywhere. Be safe.

[johannestevans]

the thing is like. i get that it's scary and makes people who do desire to get pregnant uncomfortable when we talk about the brutality and violence of pregnancy and the damage that pregnancy can do to your body

but you deserve to give informed consent to that process.

the lies around pregnancy - that it's inherently safe, that it doesn't do you permanent damage, that it's only extremely rare for people to die of pregnancy complications, etc like

all of these are lies constructed so that more people will get pregnant w/o knowing all that

there needs to be more talk about the impact of miscarriages and how common they are, how different abortion processes are and how accessible they are

but also like. talking about how pregnancy fucks your body up should not be taboo

this is a process that permanently changes most people's bodies, and that's even if the pregnancy doesn't do them like. severe illness or injury

and i just think everybody should have a right to KNOW that

bc to live in a society that intentionally obscures and hides facts about a completely optional and dangerous process does so for a reason, and that reason is based in a very sinister ideology that does not value bodily autonomy or informed consent

[thelittleblackfox]

the number of people who are pregnant and don't know about what induced labour entails and what post partum bleeding is horrifies me

[zenaidamacrouras1]

Here is a story about the depths to which pregnant people are seen as a vessel for a baby, and the importance of finding prenatal care that assumes you are a human and not a baby holder:

When I was pregnant I was in a million forums for pregnant people because (cough adhd hyperfixation) and I had something called SPD (Symphysis pubis dysfunction) (not Sensory Processing Disorder though I also have that) which is where your pubic bones separate early (more or less) because they get all loosey goosey as your body gets ready to crank that baby out.

Except my pubic bone got confused and got misaligned at like 3 months pregnant. I could barely walk. I couldn't roll over in bed. Doing something that required me to shift my weight from one foot to another like opening a door knob was like an excruciatingly painful knife being stabbed into my pubic bone, I can't express how intense and blinding it was.

So I am in one million baby forums like "am I dying what is happening why is there a knife in my pubic bone" and all these people are like "I have that too! my doctor says it's normal and not to worry because it doesn't hurt the baby. I just deal with it by laying in bed for months in excruciating pain and think about how lucky I am to be having a little miracle growing in my body."

So lol nope. I went to my midwife and they are like, "Oh squeeze a can between your knees look up a physical therapy youtube on SPD" and I did that can-squeeze thing and it CURED THE PROBLEM in ONE DAY. I had been SUFFERING, y'all, it felt miraculous.

And I was so full of rage (flames, flames on the side of my face) that people are being told "Oh, it's NORMAL just deal with it" "It doesn't hurt the baby." Like, look, yes it's NORMAL but it's 100% treatable!!! SPD (again, not Sensory processing disorder) affects 1 in 5 pregnant people.

I was lucky to have amazing midwives (need a gender neutral term for that profession, but they see pregnant men and women)(side note highly recommend midwives if you are gender nonconfirming/a man/etc) and I have DOZENS of examples of shit like this.

(Another example is post partum friends being like "oh I am peeing my pants 900x day after giving birth" and my doctor says it's NORMAL so I just dealt with it for decades. My midwives were like "Oh that's normal and also physical therapy cures that in like 2 sessions")

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

When my sister was looking to get pregnant she was given the best advice. She was told that being pregnant is an experience akin to being in a moderate sized car crash, in terms of risk and lasting injury.

Some people in moderate car crashes are very lucky, and walk away with zero injury. Some are very unlucky, and die. But most people fall into the third category, where they'll be injured at the time, then heal, and then for the rest of their life they have some minor and liveable complication from the injury. Like a knee that lets you know when the rain is coming, or a back that doesn't like seats without lumbar support, or a shoulder that never quite gets its full range of motion back.

The vast majority of people survive and thrive, like. But their body is never the same again. And people should know that when they make the choice of whether to put their body through that or not

[haledamage]

my mom had a complication postpartum that caused pain and swelling in her left leg. at the time she was told it was "milk leg" and that it was normal and she'd be fine, but it never went away or got better. she finally found a doctor recently who was willing to do some tests and found out it's a condition called "May-Thurner syndrome" and had surgery to fix it

she's been suffering with this since she gave birth to me. I'm 38 years old. she had that surgery last week.

there needs to be more dialogue about the things your body goes through during pregnancy. "that's normal" or "everyone goes through that" need to stop being used to shut down conversations about the horrific, permanent damage that can be done to bodies during pregnancy and childbirth. just because it's "normal" doesn't mean it needs to be endured

[giggymantis]

I know this is not pertinent to the post but midwife is probably not gendered in the way you think. (The post gets this right btw but I see a lot of people getting it backwards) The “wife” in midwife (with the woman in OE) refers to the person giving birth, not the Obstetrician.

Granted, it still needs to be updated because not just women give birth.

Here is an etymologically equivalent but gender neutral term I just made:

- pregger helper

[anarchistmemedistro]

[millionmovieproject]

Hey also: babies are not medicine, or unconditional love playthings. Having a baby won't save your relationship, or fix the problems in your life if you haven't done the work to get yourself in a good place mentally, physically, and emotionally, already. People don't ask to be born, and having to grow up with parents that transfer their problems onto their children just perpetuates the cycles of abuse and life-long issues. Given you're not likely to get clear, concise, unbiased healthcare anyway, as seen above, and it will be continually impressed upon you that it is your duty to have children, make sure you're not succumbing to social pressures, or wanting to be a parent for the wrong reasons.

[fozmeadows]

Genuinely, I think a large part of why so many people are unwilling to talk about risks, complications, pain and injury around birth, pregnancy and lactation is because of how deeply ingrained the (primarily but not exclusively) religious idea that "a woman's body is designed to have children" is. Because if you actually sat down and looked, clear-eyed, at all the many ways in which even a healthy pregnancy can negatively impact the body, it would be that much harder to believe that design factors in at all, unless we're willing to argue that the designer was shit at their job. But if you're sold the idea that pregnancy is some divinely ordained and/or ultimate expression of Feminine Life Purpose, and then you have a bad experience, you're much more likely to blame yourself, or to think there's something wrong with you, or to suffer in silence because nobody ever told you this could happen so there must not be any easy solutions, and that makes me so fucking mad I could spit.

[olderthannetfic]

No, no, and NO.

AO3 does not live in “the cloud” because that is other people’s computers, and other people’s computers are vulnerable to censorship.

AO3 is on its own computers. It does still have to be housed somewhere, and I suppose a determined enough hater could try to find that place and go after it, but it’s a lot harder than sending spurious complaints to Amazon or whomever going “BadWrong things are hosted on your cloud service!”

Owning the servers is a core tenet of OTW/AO3.

[zz9pzza]

Warming up a new database server….

[elfwreck]

When people involved with AO3 talk about “the cost of servers” they don’t mean “the cost to pay Amazon for space on their servers.” They mean, like, the cost to physically own them, and eventually replace them with new ones. And the operating costs to run them.

AO3 is not “in the cloud.” AO3 is stored on physical machines that the OTW owns.

While this is not a solution that can work for everyone who wants to deal with controversial content, it is why AO3ple sneer at alt-righters who complain about getting thrown off hosting platforms.

[crowns-of-violets-and-roses]

I Want Us to Own the Goddamned Servers

Because I want us to own the goddamned servers, ok? Because I want a place where we can’t be TOSed and where no one can turn the lights off or try to dictate to us what kind of stories we can tell each other.

[lierdumoa]

AO3 is what a website looks like when you seize the means of production.

[twistedingenue]

Not to be former Catholic-blogging on main but Chicago Pope can WRITE, y'all

Breaking the chains of new forms of slavery 173. This distorted view of the human person is reflected today in various forms of servitude directly linked to the digital economy. Nothing in the world of AI is immaterial or magical. Every seemingly immediate and flawless response is the result of a long chain of mediation, involving vast networks of natural resources, energy infrastructure and, above all, people. A significant part of the digital economy’s functioning relies on the silent work of millions of people engaged in essential yet largely unseen activities, such as data labeling, model training and content moderation, often involving disturbing material. In many cases, these workers are young people, predominantly women, working under demanding conditions for minimal wages. Added to this invisible labor is the even harsher work of extracting the resources required for the production of the devices and microprocessors on which AI depends. In some regions of the world, children and adolescents work in dangerous conditions, crushing the materials from which rare earth elements are extracted. The bodies of these people are scarred, injured and worn down so that computational flow may continue uninterruptedly. Furthermore, criminal networks use online platforms, messaging systems, anonymous payment methods and profiling techniques in order to recruit, control and transport victims of trafficking — very often minors — reducing men and women to “data” to be tracked and “packages” to be moved around within the same digital circuits that support much of the global economy. This reality deeply challenges the moral conscience of our time. It is not enough to invoke efficiency, nor to celebrate the benefits of innovation, if they are built on a chain of exploitation that remains deliberately hidden. If technology promises emancipation, yet produces new forms of global subordination, it stands in contradiction to the fundamental principle of human dignity.

MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS OF HIS HOLINESS POPE LEO XIV ON SAFEGUARDING THE HUMAN PERSON IN THE TIME OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

[adventures-in-poor-planning]

prayer to whichever dead catholic person is most appropriate: may I not have to run a whole week of surprise camps on crutches. in a knee brace.

[adventures-in-poor-planning]

Im agnostic raised liberal protestant, but absolutely the catholics got saints right. Sometimes your problem is so fucking specific you need Some Guy. If you're listening, Guy of Workers Who Have Strain Injuries,

[adventures-in-poor-planning]

No fucking WAY, there's actually a knee injury Guy? Catholicism accidentally reinventing the medical specialty system......

[youremysunshine8]

I know you're wondering: are there slutty pictures of him revealing his knees?

Saint Roch, by Francesco Ribalta, c. 1625, Museo de Bellas Artes, Valencia

[image id: st. Roch staring soulfully and hiking up his robe to show that his thigh has a bubo on it, also sluttily revealing his knees]

[running-with-toast]

what the dog doin

[meduseld]

You're not gonna believe this, but the dog is a key part of the story and he's always supposed to be depicted with it:

He withdrew into the forest, where he made himself a hut of boughs and leaves, which was miraculously supplied with water by a spring that arose in the place; he would have perished had not a dog belonging to a nobleman named Gottardo Pallastrelli supplied him with bread and licked his wounds, healing them.

And just for fun, this is my fave statue of him:

[kawuli]

random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)

[yomikoreadsbooks]

Keeping a list of Google alternatives just in case…

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine

[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.

[depsidase]