i kind of want a mouse
Claire Keane
Today's Document

pixel skylines

shark vs the universe

#extradirty

Kaledo Art
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
noise dept.
Show & Tell
Peter Solarz

ellievsbear

Product Placement
Not today Justin

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⁂
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Monterey Bay Aquarium

if i look back, i am lost
Mike Driver
Sweet Seals For You, Always

seen from Côte d’Ivoire

seen from United States

seen from Türkiye

seen from Türkiye
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seen from United Kingdom
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@maestrobabby
i kind of want a mouse
HERE’S THE THING THOUGH
I used to work for a call center and I was doing a political survey and I called this number that was randomly generated for me and the way our system worked was voice-activated so when the other person said hello you’d get connected to them, so I just launch right into my “Harvard University and NPR blah blah blah” thing and then there’s this long pause and I think the person’s hung up even though I didn’t hear a click
And then I hear “you shouldn’t be able to call this number.”
So I apologize and go into the preset spiel about because we aren’t selling anything, etc. etc. and the answer I get is
“No, I know that. What I mean is that it should be impossible for you to call this number, and I need to know how you got it.”
I explain that it’s randomly generated and I’m very sorry for bothering him, and go to hang up. And before I can click terminate, I hear:
“Ma’am, this is a matter of national security.”
I accidentally called the director of the FBI.
My job got investigated because a computer randomly spit out a number to the Pentagon.
This is my new favourite story.
When I was in college I got a job working for a company that manages major air-travel data. It was a temp gig working their out of date system while they moved over to a new one, since my knowing MS Dos apparently made me qualified.
There was no MS Dos involved. Instead, there was a proprietary type-based OS and an actually-uses-transistors refrigerator-sized computer with switches I had to trip at certain times during the night as I watched the data flow from six pm to six AM on Fridays and weekends. If things got stuck, I reset the server.
The company handled everything from low-end data (hotel and car reservations) to flight plans and tower information. I was weighed every time I came in to make sure it was me. Areas of the building had retina scanners on doors.
During training. they took us through all the procedures. Including the procedures for the red phone. There was, literally, a red phone on the shelf above my desk. “This is a holdover from the cold war.” They said. “It isn’t going to come up, but here’s the deal. In case of nuclear war or other nation-wide disaster, the phone will ring. Pick up the phone, state your name and station, and await instructions. Do whatever you are told.”
So my third night there, it’s around 2am and there’s a ringing sound.
I look up, slowly. The Red phone is ringing.
So I reach out, I pick up the phone. I give my name and station number. And I hear every station head in the building do the exact same. One after another, voices giving names and numbers. Then silence for the space of two breaths. Silence broken by…
“Uh… Is Shantavia there?”
It turns out that every toll free, 1-900 or priority number has a corresponding local number that it routs to at its actual destination. Some poor teenage girl was trying to dial a friend of hers, mixed up the numbers, and got the atomic attack alert line for a major air-travel corporation’s command center in the mid-west United States.
There’s another pause, and the guys over in the main data room are cracking up. The overnight site head is saying “I think you have the wrong number, ma’am.” and I’m standing there having faced the specter of nuclear annihilation before I was old enough to legally drink.
The red phone never rang again while I was there, so the people doing my training were only slightly wrong in their estimation of how often the doomsday phone would ring.
Every time I try to find this story, I end up having to search google with a variety of terms that I’m sure have gotten me flagged by some watchlist, so I’m reblogging it again where I swear I’ve reblogged it before.
But none of these stories even come close to the best one of them all; a wrong number is how the NORAD Santa Tracker got started.
Seriously, this is legit.
In December 1955, Sears decided to run a Santa hotline. Here’s the ad they posted.
Only problem is, they misprinted the number. And the number they printed? It went straight through to fucking NORAD. This was in the middle of the Cold War, when early warning radar was the only thing keeping nuclear annihilation at bay. NORAD was the front line.
And it wasn’t just any number at NORAD. Oh no no no.
Terri remembers her dad had two phones on his desk, including a red one. “Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the number,” she says.
“This was the ‘50s, this was the Cold War, and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on the United States,” Rick says.
The red phone rang one day in December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. “And then there was a small voice that just asked, ‘Is this Santa Claus?’ ”
His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.
“And Dad realized that it wasn’t a joke,” her sister says. “So he talked to him, ho-ho-ho’d and asked if he had been a good boy and, ‘May I talk to your mother?’ And the mother got on and said, ‘You haven’t seen the paper yet? There’s a phone number to call Santa. It’s in the Sears ad.’ Dad looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the phones to act like Santa Claus.”
“It got to be a big joke at the command center. You know, ‘The old man’s really flipped his lid this time. We’re answering Santa calls,’ ” Terri says.
And then, it got better.
“The airmen had this big glass board with the United States on it and Canada, and when airplanes would come in they would track them,” Pam says.
“And Christmas Eve of 1955, when Dad walked in, there was a drawing of a sleigh with eight reindeer coming over the North Pole,” Rick says.
“Dad said, ‘What is that?’ They say, ‘Colonel, we’re sorry. We were just making a joke. Do you want us to take that down?’ Dad looked at it for a while, and next thing you know, Dad had called the radio station and had said, ‘This is the commander at the Combat Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks like a sleigh.’ Well, the radio stations would call him like every hour and say, ‘Where’s Santa now?’ ” Terri says.
For real.
“And later in life he got letters from all over the world, people saying, ‘Thank you, Colonel,’ for having, you know, this sense of humor. And in his 90s, he would carry those letters around with him in a briefcase that had a lock on it like it was top-secret information,” she says. “You know, he was an important guy, but this is the thing he’s known for.”
“Yeah,” Rick [his son] says, “it’s probably the thing he was proudest of, too.”
So yeah. I think that might be the best wrong number of all time.
Source: http://www.npr.org/2014/12/19/371647099/norads-santa-tracker-began-with-a-typo-and-a-good-sport
When my dad was alive, we used NORAD to track Santa every year, and I think he would have really loved this story.
fireflies lighting up a rural Pennsylvania field at dusk
Hungry boi
(via)
not to talk about doctor who but remember being a lonely depressed teenager and hearing him say '900 years of time and space and i've never met anyone who wasn't important'
he was like ‘just this once-everybody lives’ and i chased that shit with homosexual determination for every day since, like maybe through pure force of will i could save everyone i loved from a system that wanted us dead
You know what? This reminds me of this story from Tom Baker.
Doctor Who has been saving people and inspiring them for decades.
when i was 22 i was diagnosed with bipolar I disorder and i was DEEP in the depression cycle and had suicidal ideation but one day a doctor who quote came streaming back into my mind:
"You lot, you spend all your time thinking about dying, like you're going to get killed by eggs or beef or global warming or asteroids. But you never take time to imagine the impossible, that maybe you survive"
and it hit me hard cause all i could think was "i want the numbed feelings/heightened sadness bottomless pit feelings to stop, and i don't know how i'm gonna come out of this alive" but everyday after i remembered that quote i'd think "maybe i will survive this" and just that simple mantra every morning helped me push through the individual therapy, and the group therapy, and figuring out want medicines work best for me and i did survive.
and to this day the 9th doctor is still one of my absolute faves
symphonic gamers getting taken off of youtube is devastating but thankfully i was able to save a few clips of it. this one is battle against a true hero and it’s incredible
i can genuinely feel it in my chest when the spear of justice motif drops in
susie has definite Cookie Monster PJ Pants Girl Energy
FORGET WHAT I SAID COACH IM TEAM CAPTAIN
if you can dodge a kris you can dodge a ball
non homestuck dont understand. if you have cosplayed terezi, sollux, or dirk at ANY point in your life you have bought shades from the same man. like its literally just one man whos making HUNDREDS of pairs of specialty cosplay glasses. it is literally JUST one man who makes those glasses on the entire internet
this one man controls the entire pointy anime shades supply. if he ever dies we are all thoroughly fuckt and left to make our own like animals
YALL HE FOUND MY POST AND RESPONDED
“homestuck keeps the lights on” im not crying youre crying
I figured I’d track down and link his etsy, so here you go:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/Akujinscos
I’m not a homestuck but hey this guy needs to eat so here’s a link if any of y’all are
Yeah bro hit me up we’ll cancel some plans sometime
Ok she has a point
Cat does some trust falls.
dinner
“alphy’s square glasses are inspired by john egbert” - something toby fox decided to say, for some reason
DELTARUNE CHAPTER 2 IS OUT.
that vampire lockpicking story from skyrim is constantyl in my head, , ,
Clown porn no homestuck
Now you can understand how it sounds when i hear any siren
tornado sirens normally: 📢⚠️🌪 THERES A TORNADO 📢💥❗️
these tornado sirens: 💫🌸✨ there's a tornado 🥰 🌈🌱
✨😻💖🎶four tornadoes 🎶💖😻✨
Hey so my hobby in the last week or so has been of building a giant glass ball in Minecraft, 64 block in diameter, put a wall in its centre and fill one half with water, with lava in the other. Here’s the result :
You can absolutely reblog if you like it, it’s random creation for fun that happens to be pretty