hey if u can’t drive/are a slow learner due to a disability or mental illness, just picture historical figures like pirates or the founding fathers trying to operate a car.
this is a serious point and makes me feel a lot better about my refusal to get a driver’s license and yes neurotypicals please reblog this but i’m also thinking about that one gif of george washington barrelling towards you in a truck
Last March, my father attempted to file his Taxes.
My beloved father is a Boomer. Unlike most Boomers, my father is rather handy with technology because he was one of the people that had a not-insignificant hand in Developing a hell of a lot of it. He was studying Computer Science at Cal Poly before the computer science degree existed. I have many fond childhood memories of skipping through the aisles of various electronic and computer part warehouses while Dad described something that either terrified the staff or made them worship him as a God. He taught himself how to use his smartphone. Internationally.
So when he saw the option to file digitally with the IRS through the “ID.me” program, he leapt at the chance to celebrate the Federal Government finally entering the Digital Age.
It was all going swimmingly for about six hours, until he was ready to file and the system told him that it needed to verify his identity.
“Very Well.” said my father, a man unafraid of talking to himself and getting something out of the conversation. “It wouldn’t do for me to get someone else’s return.”
The System told him that it needed him to take a “Digital Image ID”.
a.k.a: A Selfie.
“A-ha!” Dad beams. Dad is very good at taking selfies. He immediately pulled out his phone, snapped one, and tried to upload it.
Please log into your Id.me Account and use the provided app to submit your Digital Image ID. The System clarified.
“Oh. You should have said so.” Dad pouted, but used his phone to log onto the ID.me account, do the six security verification steps and double-checked that the filing looked the same as it did on the desktop, gave the IRS like nine permissions on his phone, and held up the camera to take his Federal Privacy Invasion Selfie.
Please align your face to the indicated grid. Said The System, pulling up a futuristic green-web-of-polygons approximation.
“Ooh, very Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry would HATE this!” Dad said cheerfully, aligning his face to the grid. My father is a bit… cavalier, when it comes to matters of personal information and federal government, because he’s been on FBI watchlists since the late 60’s when he was protesting The Vietnam War and Ronald Regan before he’d broken containment.
Alas.
Anyway, there is very little information the federal government does not have on him already, but he’s as good at stalking the FBI as they are at stalking him, and had worked out a solution: He has something approaching a friendship with the local Federal Agent (Some guy named “Larry”. Allegedly), and got Larry hooked on Alternative Histories and Dad’s collection of carefully-researched “there is very likely buried treasure here” stories, and Larry is loath to bother his favorite Historical Fanfiction author too much.
But I digress.
After thinking for a minute, The System came back with an Error Message. Please remove glasses or other facial obstructions.
And here is where the real trouble began.
See, my father wears glasses that do substantially warp the appearance of his face, because he is so nearsighted that he is legally blind without them. His natural focal point is about 4 inches in front of his nose. While Dad can still take a selfie because he (approximately) knows where his phone is if it’s in his hand, he cannot see the alignment grid.
He should ask someone to take it for him! I hear the audience say. Yes, that would be the sane and reasonable thing to do, but Dad was attempting to do taxes at his residence in Fort Collins, while his immediate family was respectively in Denver, Texas and Canada. He tried calling our neighbors, who turned out to be in Uganda.
He looked down at the dog, Arwen, and her little criminal paws that can open doorknobs, but not operate cell phones.
She looked back at him, and farted.
“Well, I’ll give it a try, but if it gives me too much trouble, I’ll call Larry, and Larry can call the IRS about it.” Dad told her.
She continued to watch him. Arwen is an Australian Kelpie (a type of cattle-herding dog), going on 14 years old, deaf as a post and suffering from canine dementia now, but she still retains her natural instinct to Micromanage. She was also trained as a therapy dog, and even if she can’t hear my dad, still recognizes the body language of a man setting himself up for catastrophe.
So, squinting in the late afternoon light next to the back door, Dad attempted to line his face up with a grid he could only sort-of see, and took A Federal Selfie.
The System thought about it for a few moments.
Image Capture Failed: Insufficient Contrast. The System replied. Please move to a darker place.
“...Huh.” Dad frowned. “Alright.”
He moved to the middle of his office, away from the back door, lit only by the house lighting and indirect sunlight, and tried again.
Image Capture Failed. Please move to a darker place.
“What?” Dad asked the universe in general.
“Whuff.” Arwen warned him against sunk costs.
Dad ignored her and went into the bathroom, the natural habitat of the selfie. Surely, only being lit by a light fixture that hadn’t been changed since Dad was attempting to warn everyone about Regan would be suitably insufficient lighting for The System. It took some negotiating, because that bathroom is “Standing Room Only” not “Standing And Holding Your Arms Out In Front Of You Room”. He ended up taking the selfie in the shower stall.
As The System mulled over the latest attempt, Arwen shuffled over and kicked open the door to watch.
Image Capture Failed. Please Move to a Darker Place.
“Do you mean Spiritually?” Dad demanded.
“Whuff.” Arwen cautioned him again.
Determined to succeed, or at least get a different error message that may give him more information, Dad entered The Downstairs Guest Room. It is the darkest room in the house, as it is in the basement, and only has one legally-mandated-fire-escape window, which has blinds. Dad drew those blinds, turned off the lights and tried AGAIN.
Image Capture Failed. Please Move To A Darker Place.
“DO YOU WANT ME TO PHOTOGRAPH MYSELF INSIDE OF A CAVE??” Dad howled.
“WHUFF!” Arwen reprimanded him from under the pull-out bed in the room. It’s where she attempts to herd everyone when it’s thundering outside, so the space is called her ‘Safety Cave’.
Dad frowned at the large blurry shape that was The Safety Cave.
“Why not?” he asked, the prelude to many a Terrible Plan. With no small amount of spiteful and manic glee, Dad got down onto the floor, and army-crawled under the bed with Arwen to try One Last Time. Now in near-total darkness, he rolled on his side to be able to stretch his arms out, Arwen slobber-panting in his ear, and waited for the vague green blob of the Facial grid to appear.
This time, when he tapped the button, the flash cctivated.
“GOD DAMN IT!” Dad shouted, dropping the phone and rubbing his eyes and cursing to alleviate the pain of accidentally flash-banging himself. Arwen shuffled away from him under the bed, huffing sarcastically at him.
Image Capture Failed. Please move to a darker place.
“MOTHERFU- hang on.” Dad squinted. The System sounded strange. Distant and slightly muffled.
Dad squinted really hard, and saw the movement of Arwen crawling out from under the bed along the phone’s last known trajectory.
“ARWEN!” Dad shouted, awkwardly reverse-army crawling out from under the bed, using it to get to his feet and searching for his glasses, which had fallen out of his pocket under the bed, so by the time he was sighted again, Arwen had had ample time to remove The Offending Device.
He found her out in the middle of the back yard, the satisfied look of a Job Well Done on her face.
She did not have the phone.
“Arwen.” Dad glared. It’s a very good glare. Dad was a teacher for many years and used it to keep his class in order with sheer telepathically induced embarrassment, and his father once glared a peach tree into fecundity.
Arwen regarded him with the casual interest a hurricane might regard a sailboat tumbling out of its wake. She is a force of nature unto herself and not about to be intimidated by a half-blind house ape. She also has cataracts and might not be able to make out the glare.
“I GIVE UP!” Dad shouted, throwing his hands in the air and returning to the office to write to the IRS that their selfie software sucks ass. Pleased that she had gotten her desired result, Arwen followed him in.
To Dad’s immense surprise, the computer cheerfully informed him that his Federally Secure Selfie had been accepted, and that they had received and were now processing his return!
“What the FUCK?” Dad glared. “Oh well. If I’ve screwed it up, Larry can call me.”
---
I bring this up because recently, Dad received an interesting piece of mail.
It was a letter from the IRS, addressed to him, a nerve-wracking thing to recessive at the best of times. Instead of a complaint about Dad’s Selfie Skills, it was a letter congratulating him on using the new ID.me System. It thanked him for his help and expressed hopes he would use it again next year, and included the selfie that The System had finally decided to accept.
“You know, my dad used to complain about automation.” Dad sighed, staring at the image. “Incidentals my boy! My secretary saves the state of California millions of dollars a year catching small errors before they become massive ones! He’d say. Fought the human resources board about her pay every year. I used to think he was overestimating how bad machines were and underestimating human error, but you know? He was right.”
He handed me the image.
My father was, technically, in the image. A significant amount of the bottom right corner is taken up by the top of his forehead and silver hair.
Most of the image, the part with the facial-recognition markers on it, was composed of Arwen’s Alarmed and Disgusted Doggy face.
“Oh no!” I cackled. “Crap, does this mean you have to call the IRS and tell them you’re not a dog?”
“Probably.” Dad sighed. “I know who I’m gonna bother first though.” he said, taking out his phone (Dad did find his phone a few hours after Arwen absconded with it when mom called and the early spinach started ringing).
“Hey Larry!” Dad announced to the local federal agent. “You’re never gonna believe this. My dog filed my taxes!”
Larry considered this for a moment. “Is this the dog that stole my sandwich? Out of my locked car?” he asked suspiciously.
“The very same.” Dad grinned.
“Hm. Clever Girl.” Federal Agent Larry sighed. “I figured it was only a matter of time before she got into tax fraud.”
---
I'm a disabled artist making my living writing these stories. If you enjoy my stories, please consider supporting me on Ko-fi or Pre-ordering my Family Lore Book on Patreon. Thank you!
Smash that mf reblog button if you stoically ignore all labelled washing instructions and everything your mama ever told you about laundry and just send those bastards hurgling around in an overfilled tub to meet either death or glory
Something I learned from a costume designer: if an item can be washed multiple ways the designer is only legally obligated to put one of the ways on the tag, but if there’s only one way to wash that item they have to put Only on the instructions
If the tag says “Dry Clean” it’s safe to machine wash but the designer thinks it looks better if you get it dry cleaned
But if it says “Dry Clean Only” you will destroy it if you wash it any other way
Not so friendly reminder that musk specifically came up with, and pushed, for hyperloop knowing that it would never be made, as an effort to stop the development of highspeed rail in America and shift all political discussions of it because "something better is around the corner":
As I’ve written in my book, Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.
Several years ago, Musk said that public transit was “a pain in the ass” where you were surrounded by strangers, including possible serial killers, to justify his opposition.
source: new york times
Also: 2024 update, the total length of China's high-speed rail tracks has now reached well over 45,000 km, or 28,000 miles, by the end of 2023.
They are additionally five years ahead of schedule and expect to double the total number within ten years. And, before someone inevitably complains about "how expensive it is", they are turning over a net-profit of over $600M USD a year.
i don’t necessarily conflate “falling down” with “being dismantled brick by brick and shipped to arizona to be rebuilt” but i guess its not my area of expertise
OK the Wikipedia article is a fun read if you're into such things but my favorite fact is that they rebuilt the bridge over dry land and then dug a canal underneath.
Livestock guardian dogs are great and the funniest thing happened when I moved here to Angeles Crest Creamery with my sheep. The resident goats had never seen sheep before and found them *terrifying*. To the crew of three Great Pyrnees the sheep were self evidently just more livestock to be protected though.
So then lambing happened and the lambs got to an exploratory age and periodically one would see Gloria's big white goat Apple and mistake her for my big white goat Gwyn and think "oh there's my flock" and go bouncing over to the Original Goats. The OGs would be HORRIFIED that this monster was coming RIGHT AT THEM and start moving away.
The lamb would follow.
The goats would think "oh shit it's chasing us" and start running.
The lamb would think "oh shit everyone is running I better catch up".
They would do laps around the barn like this, one 20lb Soay lamb pursuing a flock of 16 150lb Nubian goats.
The dogs would hear the ruckus and come running, thinking that a predator was after the goats, and stop and stare and and you could see them desperately trying to figure out what they needed to protect the flock from because there was no perceivable danger.
Then the Lamb's mother would yell for it and it would stop and peel off to go home and the goats would stop and look embarrassed and everything would calm down until the next time a lamb didn't pay attention.
I miss them a lot, listening to “we’ll never change” and “shadow in the sun” reminds me of Victor and Eli every time. My Roman Empire I fear, I think about them too much.
gummygunk
blakekathryn
jacobvanloon
snowghoul
titsay
janainaart
origamiaround
baratheonpilled
vaporwave
prguitarman
andulkaphoto
ellievsbear
