someone lives here

carrd

[kingofhearts709]

v lives here

26 - they/he

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personal posts: #the king speaks

saved posts: #the kings trove

[polls-by-fip]

im curious about a specific generational divide

regardless of you being queer or not, did your parents ever gave you the "if you turn out to be gay it would be fine" talk, before you ever had the chance to say anything on your own about that?

gen z, yes

gen z, no

millenial, yes

millenial, no

gen x, yes

gen X, no

baby boomer, yes

baby boomer, no

Remaining time: 5 days 36 minutes

because it happened to me and im wondering if this was a product of the ongoing cultural change around gay issues. before i ever had the chance to say to my parents "i am this" my mom was already sitting me aside to tell me "if there is anything you want to tell me, i want you to know ill accept you no matter what"

[dochollibee]

Pat pat

[blackleatherbag]

[maplesynth]

so i spent far too long on this.

for those unaware, the spaghetti wall of letters and numbers is a base64-encoded JPEG image (and not a URL as some guessed). in certain cases when you tried to insert/paste an image into what’s ostensibly a text-only box, this could happen.

the thing that’s bugging me however is that there’s image data there. we have fairly a clear (albeit with JPEG artifacts) screenshot of text that, thanks to how Windows ClearType renders text, each character is identical to each other, that is to say, an uppercase Q will always look more or less pixel-perfect each time, meaning we don’t have to guess what a Q looks like, we simply have to pixel-accurate match it.

as an aside, this is why regular OCR struggles so much with this kind of data retrieval, such as code even when it’s clearer than a physical paper scan. ordinarily, OCR will try to best-guess every single letter because it expects each letter to be slightly different from each other (as would be the unpredictable nature in a scanned document), and on top of that most OCR today will try to autocorrect because it expects the scanned text to contain words in some human written language.

so, all we have to do is make a program to recognize each character and piece back together the whole base64 string, right? well…

first i stitched all 7 images back into a single block of text, observing the consistency of the line spacing. some of the screenshots have little bits of the previous one sticking out of it, which helps with alignment and to make sure they’re in the right order.

after that i had to sample every single letter off this file. this means going around the file and finding one example of each different character we’re trying to identify, saving it as its own separate file so that the program can load them as references to compare against in the full image. for base64, the alphabet consists of a-z, A-Z, 0-9, +, / and =. once i had the initial code in place…

…close! but oh so far. if any one single character in a base64 string is wrong or missing, the resulting decode will be wrong. the issues i was having were mostly with the lowercase r and j because of how the kerning affected the pixels around those letters. i was also getting false matches for r where there should be an m. what followed was grueling hours of tweaking the matching code and my known font set to better fit the original image and get as close as possible to a 100% match. here is the resulting code, maybe it’ll be useful for someone and this won’t have been a complete waste of time.

once i was confident through the verification image that i had all characters recognized, i put it through a base64 to JPEG decoder. i actually did this several times as i improved the recognition and what follows is the best result that came out of it yet. i suspect some of the data might be missing (perhaps a line or block of text got lost in between screenshots), or i have a wrong character somewhere resulting in a wrong value. this is the image extracted from OP’s base64 string:

we can finally know what they meant when they said “me in a relationship” and i can finally go the fuck to sleep.

[maplesynth]

update: i found that the string that i used to decode the image in the previous reblog actually had one letter wrong.

with this it still doesn’t parse as fully valid base64 in strict mode so i think there’s still another letter in there that’s wrong, but i couldn’t find it. however this gives us a better look:

and this is finally enough to do a reverse image search. i present to you, the HD version of our intrepid massive backpacker:

still have no idea what they mean by “me in a relationship” with that, though.

[almost-correct-quotes]

#they have baggage

[partywithponies]

Strange racists and homophobes on the internet seem to have access to an alternate way cooler version of TV than me. "every white character on TV is in an interracial relationship" "every show has a gay couple in it" "main characters keep having to secretly be bisexual and nonbinary" "every show has gratuitous full frontal nudity" like damn promise?? What channel???

[urlocalpyshcopan]

as a black gay person real like where y'all be finding this stuff pass the name

[brainsforbabyjesus]

for real though, those DO NOT WATCH OR YOU'LL CORRUPT YOUR CHILDREN lists put out by conservative christian family groups is where I find all the stellar tv shows. Like, shit I didn't know half of those existed, thanks for finding them for me, gonna go watch 30 hours of gay tv now!

[infamousbrad]

I think I know how this works.

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

Same as the journalists describing Black Rock City as all naked. Same as the right-wing religious culture warriors describing television as entirely mixed-race and gender non-conforming. Not because it's even vaguely true, we know that, but because they haven't gotten over their discomfort over the last one by the time the next one comes along. The anger, not the stimulus, is the part that's continuous, so their mind lies to them that it's "all" the thing they can't get over.

[kagedtiger]

Similar effect for the presence/proportion of women in things, by the way: https://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/human-nature/perception/how-17-equals-496-the-amazing-multiplying-women.htm

[mint-swirl]

i’m on that weird shit. i’m jacking odd. disturbating. creeping my meat

[mint-swirl]

*scared* what’s gonna happen on june tenth

[kingofhearts709]

sometimes you forget how far down youve shoved the desire to be loved that when someone shows it unconditionally it hurts your very soul. theres this really terrible ache that pushes on your insides when you never expect love and never tell yourself you deserve love or need love or even want love, and someone gives it to you just because they feel like doing so. like something really just wants to crawl out through your throat and your eyes and beg for it. and very counterproductively, and quite often, you will absolutely numb that feeling down because youd rather take feeling nothing than feeling that ache that you know will subside if you just let it sit and you actively embrace it, but love takes too long and numbness takes nothing at all

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

and what if I told you guys that virtually everyone you ever meet will turn out to be really interesting if you give them a chance

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

some real miserable fucks in the notes I fear

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

I'm not even saying you have to talk to every single person you meet. and you're certainly not going to LIKE all of them. but every person does have a rich interior life and complex feelings and unique worldview. sorry.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

hey man how's it going

sorry for getting self righteous about uuuuh my belief in the innate wonder of human life and connection I guess

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

hey man how's it going

[bunjywunjy]

wow. made it less than three months in

[ooklet]

this is truly one of the most tumblr posts i've ever seen. i know chronically online people exist in all corners of the internet but i feel like this is the only place where someone could say something as uncontroversial as "you will find out that people have personalities when you talk to them" and get responses like "oh so you're making the ABLEIST assertion that i should FORCE MYSELF to push past my SOCIAL ANXIETY to talk to BIGOTS????" amazing work, guys

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

[fuckrozanov]

the worst writing crime you can ever commit in my opinion is watering down the dirty talk because you’re self-conscious that it sounds like it’s from a bad porno…..i cannot stress this enough……leave it alone. the moment you tell yourself he would not fucking say that you’re doomed. people will say almost anything if their dick is hard enough

[capitulism]

The largest mass shooting in American history was a hate crime against gay people. Don’t ever forget that.

[exmellivorinae]

June 12, 2016. Putting a date on this for when it gets reblogged months from now by people who think the post is about something from 30, 40 years ago.

[butch-reidentified]

I am a survivor of the Pulse nightclub shooting, having grown up in Orlando and just turned 20 a month prior. If you didn’t know, there were several families who refused to claim the bodies of their relatives due to their sexuality. One family even had their relative’s name removed from the memorial. Murdered by the same hate with which their families reject them in both life and death.

Many, many people celebrated Pulse. We were told we deserved it. That it was God’s punishment for our sin of loving the same sex. We are sent messages like these I received in 2018:

We in the community often call the victim count 49+ to include the survivors who couldn’t live with the pain.

The event was never officially declared a hate crime or targeted homophobic attack and is rarely listed as one in databases.

At our vigils for those slaughtered, Extremist Christian groups showed up to protest, holding signs like this:

ID: Me kissing a woman I was casually seeing in front of an angry looking man with a “Sodomy is Sin” sign.

Please understand how much more than just a mass shooting this was. We are still to this day harassed and told we deserved it by some.

This year was the sixth anniversary. The first couple years I received dozens of messages checking in on me on 6/12. Year 5 got enough news coverage for people to think to reach out to me. This year it was my therapist, the woman I kissed in that photo, and a couple of other gun violence survivor friends. People are forgetting already.

[butch-reidentified]

With the 7 year anniversary <2 weeks away, I figured I’d reblog this

[daysleftofsecondterm]

952 days left

[this-is-trans-joy]

Making some trans posters and here’s what I have so far… thoughts?

[userfish]

this pride month we’re all going to be radically pro transgender. or else.

[userfish]

hey so this means radically pro ALL transgender. don’t put limitations on this. all trans people are radically accepted here.

[funkyness]

at least can all we agree that the original gay flag with the magic and sex colours is BEAUTIFUL and it should make a comeback

[funkyness]

what’s more iconic than this

[azeroundivided]

What about the final version of the flag by the original creator?

Gilbert Baker added a 9th stripe shortly before his death, with the new stripe representing diversity. He added this stripe in reaction to the 2016 US election. It’s unfortunately not as well known as the 8 and 6 striped versions.

Here’s an image of him sewing together the 9 striped rainbow flag.

[laurasinele]

Happy pride month everyone

[vulpinesaint]

saying "question mark?" and "however comma," out loud are game changers. punctuation on the go. and it's always the funniest thing that anyone around you has ever heard

[malwareproductions]

hey. you have to love your trans brothers of color okay. and your trans sisters of color. and your nonbinary siblings of color. you have to okay. its simply non-optional

[mindllessdreaming]

and the winner of superwholock is officially??? no one. we all lost. congrats team

[buggyhuman-blog]

[viralfrog]

[dragongirlbunny]