Merellia's

CH, FR, and general media fandom stuff!

[merellia]

PETTY VILLAIN

lan wangji has a kitten i don’t make the rules

[m0thmancore]

suck, and i cannot stress this enough, my cock to the fucking base

[m0thmancore]

oh no! i dropped this screenshot that explains how to bypass this with a free adblocker! you shouldn’t reblog this or anything; it’d be terrible if people used this advice to watch ad-free youtube!!

[yr-tiktok-mom]

[onceuponatimeinerebor]

I'm literally so obsessed with this guy.

He finds these tiktoks of people freaking out about things they see on airplanes and explains why it's fine and then EVERY SINGLE TIME he goes of on a really long, extremely detailed tangent about Lord of the Rings lore before casually going back to his original topic just before the video ends.

Can you imagine being that intensely knowledgeable about aeronautics and still having enough brain space left to remember every detail of the lore from a fictional series of novals that's so exspansive they teach university level classes about it?

[rylandsgrace]

With its seven Oscar wins, including Best Picture, this became the most awarded Best Picture winner since Slumdog Millionaire (2008) 14 years earlier. Everything Everywhere All at Once + trivia

[daily-spooky]

[very-gay-alkyrion]

[andhumanslovedstories]

One of the stranger things about training brand new nurses is explaining how to min max small talk. It feels very weird to coach people on how to chat.

[andhumanslovedstories]

if I make and post an insanely detailed powerpoint on the twenty different equations I run mentally during casual conversation to make it flow better, everyone has to say that it's sexy and cool and not weird at all

[andhumanslovedstories]

remember, everyone promised to be cool! also disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer assume I said all the things you'd say to be like "i know human interaction is complicated, i know some of what i listed here would be very annoying to some people," and all that

[assiraphales]

you guys made luigi mangione trend for days and I need to see the same energy for brianna boston. she is a 43 year old mother of three who ended a phone call with blue cross blue shield (after being denied a claim) “delay deny depose, you people are next” and is now being held under a 100,000$ bond and could face FIFTEEN years of prison if charged. she has no weapons, her record is clean, and yet she is being held behind bars. they are afraid of the public and are trying to subdue. do not let them!!!! be outraged that our freedom of speech is being threatened!!!!! deny defend depose! free brianna boston!

[megmelodia]

Good news, she is out with all charges dropped

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

This is apparently false (a lie, given the Polk Co Sheriff's reporting), she has not been released without charges, she has been placed under house arrest pending trial

https://www.wfla.com/news/briana-boston-case-how-would-attorneys-defend-against-threat-accusation/

Do not take your eyes off her case. The announcement that she had been "released without charges" is almost certainly an effort to disrupt the immediate groundswell of public sympathy this exhausted and persecuted single mother is receiving.

[rubyvroom]

Round-up: A Lot of CSI-Style Forensics Have Turned Out to be Bogus

Basically a lot of it is pseudoscience that was never rigorously tested in controlled situations to see if it actually worked.

This is because it was not developed by scientists, but by police, and mainly with an interest in putting people in prison rather than uncovering the truth.

At least two dozen people have been falsely convicted due to “Bite Mark Analysis”. 

“Burn pattern analysis” put an innocent man to death in Texas

“Blood Spatter analysis” such as that shown on the TV show Dexter is actually completely unreliable even according to the US Department of Justice

Forensic hair comparison is also widely believed to be junk science and the FBI is currently reviewing convictions based on hair analysis due to the unreliability of their results

Handwriting analysis has an unreasonably high error rate, by some accounts as high as 43%

Lie detector tests, or polygraphs, are notoriously unreliable and based on bad science. Even though everybody knows this, they are still constantly being used in criminal investigations among other places.

Toxicology labs can be poorly supervised and badly run, producing false and even fraudulent results

Due to sloppy procedure at many labs and lack of regulation even DNA testing is often unreliable

Even when correct results are produced, genetic profiles may be less useful than we have been lead to believe

Fingerprinting analysis is not foolproof and actually has not been thoroughly tested, as this Frontline special discusses

Here are a few more articles on how unreliable modern forensics are.

Unfortunately due to TV shows that stress forensic investigation, juries are demanding this kind of evidence at trial, and have little idea of how untested and unreliable it really is.

[rubyvroom]

HEY REMEMBER WHEN I WROTE ABOUT THIS TWO YEARS AGO? SPECIFICALLY THE PART ABOUT FBI REVIEWING ITS FORENSICS HAIR ANALYSIS CASES? WELL THE RESULTS ARE IN AND WHOOPS: EVEN THE FBI ADMITS THAT IT’S BOGUS NOW

In case you are stopped by the paywall here’s a Slate article on the same thing and here’s another one. 

Hair analysis alone has been used in thousands of trials. The FBI is reviewing 2500 cases out of “21000 federal and state requests to the FBI’s hair-comparison unit between 1972 and 1999″. Even if this review exonerates some of those convictions, that doesn’t even begin to cover the hundreds of state and local “experts” trained by the FBI in this bogus “hair analysis” technique to do things like this:

Santae Tribble served 28 years for a murder based on FBI testimony about a single strand of hair. He was exonerated in 2012. It was later revealed that one of the hairs presented at trial came from a dog.

So anyway remember anytime you hear about “forensic evidence” that a lot of it is bullcrap and not scientifically validated and a lot of so-called experts are just pulling conclusions out of their ass.

[feedyourdeadnametothevoidfish]

the forensic hair analysis thing is terrible, the FBI literally invented a branch of forensic psuedoscience with no evidence behind it in order to boost conviction rates, then taught the bogus technique to thousands of forensic investigators in the us and around the world. we have no idea how many people have been wrongfully convicted, and this is just one in a very long list of forensic techniques that lack rigorous scientific evaluation

[rubyvroom]

It’s been another year or two so here’s an extremely recent article about how “Criminal Profiling” is totally bogus and TV shows like Mindhunters continue to focus on it because it looks cool and makes good stories, but it really only works in the movies. 

Profiling was trendy in the 70s-90s but has been falling into disrepute ever since. This 2007 analysis showed that Criminal Profilers do not outperform regular detective work. Here’s another analysis finding Profiling unreliable in its current form and suggests ways to make it more scientifically rigorous. Here’s another. 

[rubyvroom]

Hi everybody it’s eleven years later and just for fun I went and looked up the latest news on forensic science and guess what? It’s still bullshit.

They’ve made up entirely new fake techniques since the last time I posted about this. Like “9-11 Call Analysis” which is supposed to identify from a person’s voice on a phone call whether they are lying. Surprise surprise: it doesn’t work.

Despite the seeming pervasiveness of the technique, researchers who have studied 911 calls have not been able to corroborate [the original] claims. A 2020 study from the FBI warned against using 911 call analysis to bring actual cases. A separate FBI study in 2022 said applying 911 analysis may actually increase bias. And academic studies from researchers at Villanova and James Madison universities came to similar conclusions. Ultimately, five studies have not been able to find scientific evidence that 911 call analysis works.

There’s also something called SCAN – Scientific Content Analysis – that examines the statements given to the police for falsehood. This one is actually kind of promising because it uses a real scientific analysis, a grammatical formula, to map out a written personal account kind of like using an AI algorithm to diagram a sentence which can reveal that actually no I’m lying it’s total garbage

Why Are Cops Around the World Using This Outlandish Mind-Reading Tool?

The creator of Scientific Content Analysis, or SCAN, says the tool can identify deception. Law enforcement has used his method for decades,

ProPublica also describes a kind of “photo analysis” which is basically whatever a Hollywood movie writer expects to happen when the detective says ENHANCE and of course it doesn’t work either.

So why are there even more forensics techniques that don’t work every few years? If forensics is fake science, why do we keep inventing more of it?

Well, because like I said way too many years ago why have I been here so long, forensics are not created by scientists, they’re created by police. And the justice system is interested in convictions, not uncovering the truth, and these techniques get you convictions. Many of them are wrongful convictions, but oh well.

Anyway in conclusion, John Oliver agrees with me and ACAB

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[assassin1513]

🌕💙⚜️💙Stars and the Moon💙⚜️💙🌕

[assassin1513]

🩶⚜️🩶Moon Mystic🩶⚜️🩶

[assassin1513]

🌟⚜️🌟Stars Clouds🌟⚜️🌟

[ethanmaldridge]

Hey you.

[victusinveritas]

[missdreamgirl32]

Reminder that the charges against Boston have not yet been dropped and she is still under house arrest and facing up to 15 years in prison. Her husband has a gofundme to raise funds to her legal defense here:

Donate to Support Briana Boston's Legal Defense, organized by Daniel Boston

This fund is to support the bond payment, continued legal fees and other expenses … Daniel Boston needs your support for Support Briana Bost

[dearemma]

- Avery Brooks

[buggeryisthegenus]

[image description: six gifs, each a short loop featuring different Star Trek characters from various series, all played by Black actors (all playing human characters except where otherwise noted), and overlaid with parts of a quotation (by Avery Brooks, who played the role of Benjamin Sisko), as follows:

ST:TOS’s Lt. Nyota Uhura, smiling and speaking to someone out of frame; text “brown children”;

ST:TNG’s Lt. Cmdr. Geordi La Forge and the El-Aurian Guinan seated across from one another in a booth in Ten-Forward; text “must be able”;

ST:DS9’s Capt. Benjamin Sisko, seated in the Defiant’s command chair, lacing his fingers together contemplatively; text “to participate”;

ST:VOY’s Vulcan Lt. Tuvok, looking quizzically at someone off-screen; text “in”;

ST:ENT’s Ensign Travis Mayweather, climbing upside-down along a bulkhead in zero-g; text “contemporary”;

ST:DSC’s Cmdr. Michael Burnham, smiling tearfully at something or someone behind the camera position; text “mythology”;

quotation in full reads “brown children must be able to participate in contemporary mythology”.

end image description]

[catchymemes]

[s-n-arly]

OMG!  I thought it was going to be a message about perseverance or it never being too late to follow your dreams, but nooooooo.  This is excellent storytelling.

[horse-on-a-porch]

I’m fine. I’m fine I am not at all emotionally wrecked by this.

[noscribs-deactivated20260212]

[theconcealedweapon]