Good evening friends and enemies, it's time to learn how to source unsourced videos instead of perpetuating the chain of missing attributions that progressively obscure the original source with each repost. 😃
STEP 1: Take a screencap of the video, preferably while it's playing so that the PLAY button isn't blocking the image.
STEP 2: Reverse image search of choice. To my chagrin, I tend to end up resorting to Google's Search by image because Tineye keeps failing me and I haven't gotten around to doing a deep dive into currently available reverse image search services.
If you use the Firefox desktop web browser (untested: other desktop web browsers, Firefox mobile web browser) you can combine STEP 1 & STEP 2: Feel free to repost the video to Tumblr first, preferably as a draft or private post to prevent people from reblogging the uncredited vid, because this method doesn't work as well on Reddit videos.
Right-Click on the video. In the right-click menu, look for "Image Search Options" and hover over it to bring up a list of search options. I'll have to try out some of the other options later, but for this demonstration I used Google.
The search engine should open in another tab.
STEP 3: The Search. This part will be a mix of luck, tenaciousness, and deductive skills.
For Google, I recommend going to the "Exact matches" tab because it presents matches and their information in a much more condensed format than the other tabs. "Exact matches" is a misnomer, as is apparent in the screencap below. This search actually pulled up images from at least two separate videos by the same woman hanging from the same tree: one where she's wearing a slate grey pencil skirt and blazer (as in the video reposted by OP) and one where she's wearing a pale grey long-sleeved dress.
Ideally, a functional search engine would let you sort results by useful variables such as "date posted". Google is not such a search engine, and with its progressive enshittification you may or may not be able to bully Search by image into limiting results to certain date ranges. Luckily, these videos have been less flagrantly reposted than some, so I didn't have to scroll through too many.
When searching for a source, one of the primary things to pay attention to is date. Obviously, the original source has to be older than any of the reports. Unfortunately, not all the Google results have dates, so the earliest dated video isn't guaranteed to be the original.
In this case, the earliest result was of the grey dress video variant posted on Instagram on Jan 17, 2026. However, upon checking the link it became apparently that the Instagram account was not the originator of the video and their repost was unsourced.
If the date check fails you, keep an eye out for any undated results that clearly stand out from the rest. In this case, I picked up on the following:
Which has the following unique traits:
A new outfit! This is the only result that features the woman in a pale brown blazer and pencil skirt.
Dimensions. This result is 1080 x 1920, while the majority of results were smaller in size. Reposts are more likely to be downscaled from the original than upscaled, so if the initial date-check fails you, you're better off checking the largest undated results first.
Specific username (Liang Li (@liangli521)). A lot of the other results just have captions or titles in various languages. Depending on the website, these are usually either captioned reposts or random search terms that don't even link to the actual video. Results with specific usernames are rarer and thus worth checking out, though some of them may turn out to be reposters.
In this case, I hit the jackpot! There they all were: OP's video, the grey dress video, the brown blazer & skirt video, and many, many more!
Legitimately, Liang Li's whole thing seems to be going ham in skirts, dresses, and frequently heels. Possibly for advertising purposes? Very beautiful. Very powerful.
I feel like there’s literally no stronger swear word than when a girl in bonnet in a movie says something like, “But Lady Snapplecap says I cannot until I come of age!” and a dude wearing pants tucked into his boots and an open shirt replies, “DAMN Lady Snapplecap!” with the force of 435 F-bombs
"You know what's harder than Getting Better? Living Like That" is just the thesis for my whole shit going on right now honestly. You know what's harder than doing my physical therapy? Hurting All The Time. You know what's harder than addressing my gender dysphoria? Hurting All The Time
I'm Doing The Hard Thing and it's *easier* than how I was living before. If you make yourself feel better you will have more energy to spend on Getting Better. Nice inch nails - the upward spiral. Crawl out of your grave Thursday
I was raised agnostic and tend to remain ambiguous on theological matters.
-but my house has a porch on the second story that affords me a terrific view of my neighborhood and the Colorado Front Range and I was partaking of some peace before the 4th Of July Finger-Loss Festivities begin, and I have had a
~*Spiritual Experience*~
I just watched my neighbor try to unload an actual wooden pallet that had to have been forklifted into the back of his insecurity pickup worth of fireworks.
Except that he does not have a forklift in his garage.
He does have so much sports memorabilia and cardboard boxes of unsold MLM Merchandise and patriotically themed camping gear and posters of women in bikinis and flags of suspect political organizations in his garage that there is only
BARELY
enough space for the fireworks
and certainly none for his truck.
So he had to unload the individual boxes of recreational explosives from the back of his truck and stack them in the minimal space he had cleared by hand.
This is a tedious and time-consuming process as this neighbor has purchased a wide variety of recreational and locally illegal explosives instead of many of just a few types, so the individual boxes are rather small.
He begins,
and this is crucial to what happens next,
by cutting apart the industrial-grade saran wrap his explosives dealer had so carefully wrapped his merchandise in, and discarded it
unsecured
on his lawn.
Where Outdoor Conditions sometimes happen.
His process for unloading the fireworks is to
1. Climb up through the gate into the bed of his pickup truck (a feat made unusually difficult due to the slope of his driveway, and this man's fascinating decision to wear the world's Siffest and least Flexible Denim Overalls.
2. Once in the pickup bed, he selects ONE (1) box from the pile
He is apparently from a niche religious institution that doesn't believe in stacking things.
3. Carries it awkwardly around the palette that barely fits in the truck bed
4. His wife yells "Be careful!" when he nearly falls out of the pickup.
5. He Yells "SHADDUP!" back at her.
6. The Large German Shepherd barks from inside the house.
7. He yells "SHADDUP!" back at her too.
8. He sets the (1) box down on the gate
9. Slowly and awkwardly climbs out of the pickup bed
10. picks the box back up, and carries it into the garage.
Question: Aren't you going to help this poor man?
Answer: Absolutely Not.
There's four military veterans, MANY dogs, and several people with dementia in this neighborhood, all of whom are terrified by this chicanery every year and many neighbors have repeatedly asked him to maybe do the fireworks somewhere else.
(This is the Eighth Year Running he's held a major demolition event in his driveway, and for those of you who can do math, you may be able to guess the precipitating incident to this little ritual)
Additionally, I live in Colorado, a state marginally less prone to spontaneous and catastrophic conflagrations than a rotting grain silo, but only marginally.
Our recreational explosives laws are written accordingly.
I am in fact calling the Non Emergency line to report Fireworks violations, and reading off the brand labels to someone named Dorothy, who is gleefully totaling up a SPECTACULAR fine for my oblivious neighbor.
However, while I'm on the phone with Dorothy, I notice the wind begin to pick up.
and by "Notice" I mean "The Industrial Saran Wrap he left on his Lawn earlier is suddenly swept up about 100 feet into the air by an updraft intense enough to make my ears pop"
And by "Pick Up" I mean "I look up to see the sky has turned a fun and exciting shade of glass green, and the bottoms of the clouds are bumpy and rounded, and the overall effect is not unlike looking up through the bottom of the cup at God's Matcha Boba Tea."
For those of you who do not live in places with Inclement Weather, these conditions mean "You have about 30 seconds before a Major Meteorological Event Occurs."
I move under the eaves.
"Hang on Dorothy." I say, nose filling with Petrichor. "The show is about to be cancelled."
"Oh, that doesn't matter!" Dorothy cheerfully informs me. "It's illegal for him just to possess those, no matter if he actually gets to set them off or not."
"Terrific, because he's gotten maybe five boxes out of a hundred inside."
Sometimes,
the weather gods are Merciful and give you a verbal warning, typically in the kind of thunderclap that makes your ears ring.
The Gods were not merciful today.
It's not often that I am in the time, place, correct angle or in a properly observational frame of mind to see this,
But I got to see it today.
Huh. I thought. I've never seen a cloud just DIVE for the ground before.
Oh. I realized as it got closer.
That's RAIN.
Sometimes, a thunderstorm will form in such a way that the rain that would normally be distributed over an area of say,
five to tent square miles,
is instead concentrated into an area of say,
my neighborhood exactly.
So today, I was granted the rare privilege of being able to actually see the literal wall of water descend from On High and DIRECTLY onto my porch, my street, and my neighbor's truck, and his pile of unwrapped fireworks.
The sheer impact force of the downpour immediately scatters the teetering pile of fireworks boxes in the back of the truck, like the wrath of God striking down the tower of Babel.
Boxes tumble, then are washed out of the bed of the truck by the deluge.
Smaller Boxes are carried down the road in a little line by the stream forming in the gutter, like little impotent explosive ducklings.
My neighbor was definitely yelling something, but I could not hear what over the DEAFENING noise several million gallons of water makes upon high-speed contact with the earth's surface, but there was a lot of arm-waving and faces turning red as he went looking for the saran wrap that had probably blown to Nebraska by now, while his wife started disassembling the complex three-dimensional puzzle of interlocking material goods in search of a tarp.
They do not have a tarp.
They have one of those wretched Thin Blue Line flags though, and my neighbor jogs out in a futile effort to cover what's left in the truck.
Which is when the hail begins.
"HELLO?" Yelled Dorothy.
"HI!" I shouted. "WE'RE HAVING SOME WEATHER!"
"OH GOOD!" she shouts back. "WE NEED THE MOISTURE!"
I watch for a minute longer, but the loss was immediate and catastrophic- the hail is the size of marbles and dense and cares not for your pitiful cardboard and cellophane, ripping the boxes asunder and punching holes in the few things covered in plastic.
The colors on the Thin Blue Line Flag are seeping all over the remains of that it was supposed to protect in a particularly apt visual metaphor.
Not even the few boxes that made it into the garage are spared, as the German Shepherd escapes from indoors, and in an attempt to assist her humans, jumps directly into the small stack of not-yet-ruined boxes, scattering them into the driveway and deluge. She even picks one up so her humans will chase her around the yard, before dropping it in the gutter to be swept away.
So.
I was raised Agnostic
-but even I can recognize when God slaps someone upside the head and shouts "NO!" at them.
---
(If you laughed, please consider supporting my Ko-fi or preordering my book of Strange Stories on Patreon)
Ohhohohoho DO I EVER. Meet the “snapback zone,” not an area with cool hats, but instead the unintuitive range at which a hawser can kill you if it breaks under tension.
I don’t think you guys understand how much force this is, a tow rope used to move a 20 foot boat snaps under tension with enough force to dent metal, shatter glass and seriously injure anyone in its way. A Hawser on the other hand… Well I’ve seen a concrete pier with a chuck the size of a sedan ripped out of it by a line failure, and anecdotally, I’ve heard of a 2 ton heavy cargo forklift being skidded sideways, then knocked over. These lines snap with enough force to noticably dent the hull armor of navy ships.
This is a line designed to hold in place a moving object that can be easily in excess of 10000 tons. AND THEY CAN BREAK FROM THAT TENSION ALONE.
THESE THINGS ARE TERRIFYING RUBBER BANDS FROM HELL.
I’m once again reminded of its much smaller cousin, the haywire.
You’ve heard of the term, “Going haywire,” right? Ever spared a thought to why that term exists?
See, time was there was a prototype automatic hay-baler. But this was in that magic period juuust before we really got into standardized sizes. So calibration of the machine was handled manually - a mix of guessing and learning from the results of guessing.
If you’ve read Raising Steam by Sir Terry Pratchett you know that many people don’t get to learn from the results of their own guesses, due to being dead.
A poorly calibrated hay-baler had the mechanical strength to smush the hay into a tight bundle, wrap the wire around it, and tie that wire off to maintain the bale’s form. But the pressure of the over-packed hay was a constant outward force. Each bale made by an over-tight baler was potential energy in physical form.
We have a word for “potential energy in physical form” and that word is “bomb.”
So sometimes, a man would toss a hay bale and it would land with a twang and the man who’d been reaching down to pick it up where it landed was dead.
Normally I’d expect wet plant matter to be less likely to go up in flames, but not hay bales! Those pesky bacteria really like to party in damp conditions. And by party I mean “create heat.”
I was debating pre- and post- smartphone existentialism with an older gentleman today and he stopped part way through and said “Why are you a security guard? Why aren’t you teaching this at some college somewhere?” And I didn’t know what to say so I went with “Well I used to make art but nobody pays an artist”
I want to invoke thought and wonder and introspection and encourage the passions of every soul I meet forever and ever and dig until I find the glorious potential for creation and experience and joy in every single one but unfortunately I must pay rent and so I stand, a meat shield, an NPC with unlockable dialogue
#capitalism brain tells you that anyone interesting must fight to the top of their interest#and precludes the possibility of everyone everyone everyone already being interesting
Human Is is a 1955 Philip K. Dick sci-fi short story where a guy goes to another planet for work and when he comes back to Earth his personality has flipped from an asshole to a sweet, kind, considerate man. Everyone's immediately convinced that an alien has taken over his body, this goes all the way to court, and in court his wife testifies that she's noticed no changes at all and so the charges are dropped.
And then there's a bit right at the end of the story as the wife and the husband are walking out of court:
Jill turned abruptly. "What is your name? Your real name."
The man's gray eyes flickered. He smiled a little, kind, gentle smile. "I'm afraid you would not be able to pronounce it. The sounds cannot be formed..."
Jill was silent as they walked along, deep in thought. The city lights were coming on all around them. Bright yellow spots in the gloom. "What are you thinking?" the man asked.
"I was thinking perhaps I will still call you Lester," Jill said. "If you don't mind."
"I don't mind," the man said. He put his arm around her, drawing her close to him. He gazed down tenderly as they walked through the thickening darkness, between the yellow candles of light that marked the way. "Anything you wish. Whatever will make you happy."
And I. God. There's something there. A soupcon of monsterfuckery. To tell your partner in a moment of intimacy that yes, you're something so inhuman that the lips you're stealing can't speak your actual name. You're a parasite that not only had the ability to burrow under this man's skin and take over his life, but you were so desperate to escape a dead, dry, blasted planet that you did.
And for your partner to then turn around and go "I know, I've always known, and I love you" is just. God I know it's not a great Dick story but something about it is making me lose my mind
romaincrisis
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areudirty
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