WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN @so-i-did-this-thing - Tumblr Blog

The pinned post

I'm a bi, middle-aged (48), married trans man (started HRT at 33)!

With a few exceptions, I am pretty niche with my fandoms.

Expect a lot from AMC's The Terror (season 1), and Channel 5/PBS's All Creatures Great & Small (ACGAS).

Read more for cosplay & project highlights, trans stuff, as well as links about my wardrobe, the cats, my home decor, hiking pics, and why I block people who say I look like Sam Reich.

navigatorsnorth

Phenomenal spare wheel cover I walked past the other day

night-the-starfish

Disable your ad blocker? For him?, gouache on paper.

goldensunset

ok i’ve been curious about something. can you name a character who is, all three at once,

1. canonically female (no variation)

2. canonically the protagonist of her story (if it’s an ensemble cast you have to say you can legitimately see her as The main character)

3. your personal #1 favorite character in that story (ties are acceptable)

?

yes

no

super nuance bald extract button (use this wisely)

Remaining time: 5 days 6 hours

#auntie mame - also one of my fav movies

GOOD NIGHT

#cat #good night #my cat bertram

sailorloneperblog

"Bailey Island,Maine", (1885)-Alfred Thompson Bricher (1837-1908) was an American painter

ariaste

I almost fell for a phone scam today. The moral of this story is that it doesn't matter how smart you are, there is a scam out there that could very well GET YOU in the right circumstances.

For me today, those circumstances were: Several days of being underslept. Over-stressed. Forgot to take my ADHD meds this morning. Already dealing with the harried mental state of day-before-travel stress. A personal panic trigger of missing appointments because I forgot about them.

We all know by now that the IRS will not call you on the phone. The jury duty people also will not call you on the phone, and this was the crucial piece of information that I did not have cold hard confirmation of today. Here is what happened, so that you can be equipped in case these fuckers call you:

Man with an American accent tells me he's from my city's courthouse. He tells me I missed jury duty summons yesterday and that now I'm in Trouble for contempt of court and failure to appear for jury duty. I protested that I hadn't gotten a notification for jury duty, he talked over me and said scary things about getting law enforcement involved unless I went to pay some fines and talk to the judge Right Now Today. He told me that I legally wasn't allowed to hang up the phone or put it on mute. He told me that I was under a "gag order" and I couldn't tell anyone about this except law enforcement or immediate family members. He already knew my address. He had official-sounding case numbers which he made me write down and repeat back to him. He had official addresses of where I needed to go and what I needed to do: Take the cash for my "fines" to a kiosk where I would pay them and receive a "voucher" that i would then take to the courthouse where I would supposedly speak to a judge. He told me again that if I hung up the phone before I got to the courthouse, it would be taken as obstruction or failure to comply or intent to flee and he would notify the police. He told me that if I went to sort it out with the judge, it might be waived and my money would be refunded.

I have not gotten jury duty summons for a WHILE -- since before the pandemic -- and I had been idly thinking recently that maybe I was due for one. So I heard all this and my panic button about Forgetting/Missing An Appointment got hit dead-on.

I panicked, I was upset and frantic, I was not thinking clearly. This is how they fucking get you.

Honestly, thank god he wanted me to take cash to a different location instead of giving him any financial information over the phone. Thank GOD for that, because it gave my nervous system 30 minutes or so to calm down and my higher brain functions to come back online so that I could notice that there were simply too many red flags in one interaction. I did go to my bank, I did withdraw quite a lot of money in cash.

The address he gave me to go to next was for a gas station. When I expressed confusion, the scammer had smooth explanations, and before I'd even parked, he'd texted me some glossy "official" looking infographics on how to use the kiosk and why the """government""" had started doing payments this way (supposedly a COVID measure, and because the funds were 'safer' or something). The kiosk, these infographic images said, was run by a company called BTC Tech, which they claimed was "Bailing Institute & Technologies". You will notice that that does not match the acronym. The infographic was full of grammatical errors, and thank god he had me sit there in my car and read the whole thing out loud "to make sure i understood it" so that I could hear myself vocally trip over every single one of those grammatical errors and think "Wow, this is weird, it wasn't proofread?"

He sent me a QR code for the ""kiosk"" which had a familiar logo on it. He had persistently asked me for my ETA to the next location, and he was pressuring me to get out of the car and go inside to the kiosk, and it was at this point that I started lying and said, "Sure, hang on one second, i have a pebble in my shoe or something I need to fix first" while I was googling "Bitcoin logo" to verify.

Didn't really need to verify because when I went inside, the only "kiosk" looking thing was an ATM looking thing that had "BITCOIN" written on it in very loud letters. Which brings us to one of two admittedly hilarious interactions, wherein i was standing there in front of the fucking bitcoin machine with my eyes narrowed going, "This is for Bitcoin" several times while he said "No no no no it's not, it's not bitcoin, it's BTC tech" and I kept saying "Well but it says Bitcoin on it in big letters." "No no, it's just a multi-currency system, it's for the courthouse, you have to get the voucher." "Ok but it's fucking BITCOIN, this feels like a scam, I don't think the government uses BITCOIN."

I walked out. I went back to my car. I told him that I wasn't comfortable, and that I needed to call the courthouse to verify with them what the charges were, or I needed to go in person to the courthouse to check what was up. He told me if I hung up, I'd be arrested, and if I stepped foot on government property, I'd be arrested.

It was at this point that I utilized a weapon which in many cases is very dangerous and unethical to use but hey, it's perfect for situations like this: White Lady* Tears. This is exactly the situation they're MEANT for -- buying yourself time to think when a man is strongarming you into meek obedience and fear. (* I am nonbinary but he didn't need to know that.)

Anyway I pretended to cry and told him i felt nauseous and that i was going to be sick and i was just uwu so fwightened and upset and uwu uwu uwu sob sob i felt like he was getting mad at me and it was so scawy oh woe oh no -- while this happened he texted me an arrest warrant that had one of my old roommates' names on it instead of mine, but that EPIC FUMBLE didn't even matter because the whole time I am frantically googling on my phone "jury duty scam" and finding a Reddit page from a guy who posted about the exact same thing happening to him.

I hung up. I called the courthouse, got patched through to the jury pool department, and as soon as the guy picked up, I said, "Hi, my name is Alex, I just got a call saying that I missed jury duty--" and before I could even finish the sentence, the guy said, "That was a scam, we will NEVER call you." I said thank god thank god oh fuck thank god, which brings me to the second hilarious moment of this escapade, where the jury duty guy cheerfully said, "But if you have a couple thousand dollars on you, you can come over and give them to me if you want!" which did make me burst out laughing. Thank you, jury duty guy, for that much-needed moment of levity. I hope you're having a good day.

You are not immune to social engineering. I am 36 years old, highly intelligent, educated, and VERY tech-savvy, and those fuckers STILL caught me at just the right moment and with just the right hook that it triggered panic and desperation and shame and guilt and overrode my critical thinking skills for a solid 30 minutes. If it happened to me, it could happen to you. BE FUCKING VIGILANT. THE IRS WILL NEVER CALL YOU, AND JURY DUTY WILL NEVER CALL YOU.

In hindsight, I'm actually glad that it played out the way it did. For one thing, as a life lesson, that was a pretty cheap one -- all that it cost me was about an hour of my life (including the time it took to go back to the bank and deposit the money I'd withdrawn, gossip extensively to the bank teller about what happened, and get home) and some grey hairs.

For another thing, that fucker spent all that time on the phone with me and didn't get my money. I snatched his smug asshole victory right out of his mouth at the last second and wasted his time -- time that he otherwise ould have spent scamming someone who might not have gotten over their panic in time.

I actually wish that I'd kept him on the phone longer, tbh. If I'd been less rattled, I bet I could have strung him along for another hour or two. Better he spend it with me than with someone else.

JURY DUTY WILL NOT CALL YOU ON THE PHONE.

so-i-did-this-thing

My partner got a similar call a few weeks ago.

The scammers even had a setup where they "transferred" the call around. It was impressive, and they were prepared for questions about badge numbers, supervisor names, etc.

In hindsight, so much about the call was absurd -- that we were under surveillance, an arrest would automatically happen if we set foot in the police department, the need to go to a "self-serve bail kiosk", the refusal to allow anyone else on the line (the scammers did NOT want my partner to tell me anything).

I have read about this scam a million times.

But in the moment, it was incredibly intense. I only got a taste of it, too, when my partner passed me the phone. Even if you sense a red flag, you are not given a moment to examine it. So many scammer tactics are straight out of the abuser handbook: high urgency, authoritative voice, a barrage of instructions to follow. They want you scared and confused.

Even if you know, "the cops don't call", resisting this sort of thing takes practice!

I used to talk to a lot of cops in my old job, which is what helped me push back -- the minute I chastised the "officer" for being so jargon-heavy and not talking like a real person (something I did often at that old job), I was able to snap out of the scammer's spell and do a sanity check.

But if I had been a little poorer, a little more depressed, or things timed closer to my old legal troubles w/forgotten citations, I may have fallen for it.

I am with OP: You are not immune to social engineering. In fact, the more you think you are immune, the more you are likely suspectible.

A sanity check is what will break you out back into reality. DM a friend, do a Google search, talk to someone else in the house, call the very institution that is supposedly threatening you. Do *anything* to interrupt that scam call so you can think.

#advice #props to OP for being vulnerable about this #you feel like such a fool afterwards

icecreamwithjackdaniels

Joseph Crawhall (British, 1861–1913), "The Magpie"

so-i-did-this-thing

Very cool antique tophat case my mother gave me. Interior is cardboard covered in satin, with an exterior leather shell. Fastening strap with other half of lock hardware sadly missing, but the interior clasp is intact!

Debating how far I want to go on a restoration. Probably just get a bit of moisture back in, tack up thr torn strap keeper, and give the whole thing a light wax.

so-i-did-this-thing

Spent a little time with a few leather balms to get some oils back to the hatbox. You can already see more nuance & richness in the color, plus the start of some shine. Also neat to see the previous owner's name -- J. O. Swinford.

Working with dry rotted leather can be tricky, because it has the texture of dry cardboard, and over-oiling it can make it feel like soggy cardboard.

Dry rot means the piece is doomed to being a display piece, but you can still get it looking nicer while retaining a neat patina.

Last step will be to add a light layer of wax and give everything a good buff.

so-i-did-this-thing

Stopping point for this guy. 100% various leather balms and waxes. No dye.

One of my frustrations with antiques as a concept is that there isn't enough appreciation for the different types of patinas -- and I hate to when a patina is mostly a result of neglect. I would much rather a patina be the natural result of cycles of use + repair + maintenance.

This hat box was definitely neglected. And while I didn't bother with full-on repair (it's very easy to run into a Ship of Theseus situation once leather dry rots), I gave this case the attention it deserved during its life prior to that of a display piece. Its patina now includes a richness and nuance of color, plus it is much more pleasant to handle.

Before/after.

#antiques #antique #so i found this thing

creekfiend

Having seen some births now i can say that dog birth is amazing cos they just slip n slide out one after the other like a little conveyor belt. And theyre so little and unformed. And then UNGULATE BIRTHS ... are amazing for the opposite reason which is that 10mins after being born they are filing their taxes. Unless they are goats, in which case they are committing tax fraud instead

creekfiend

Goats are what is called a precocial species, which means that shortly after birth they are able to do many thimgs on their own, such as standing, walking, eating, and embezzlement

#cat #good night #my cat dexter

mdq

naamahdarling

There's something so uniquely joyful about a mare taking her new baby out for a run. I could watch them all day.

hecho-a-mano

THESE HORSES ARE SO DARK THEY ARE SO PRETTY

from-aldebaran

Let's be gorgeous with mama

#horse

vintage-polar

Shackleton’s fuckass car mention in the vintage car magazine!!

#polar exploration #ernest shackleton

neenarchive

maidens if you are going to flee dramatically from my castle in the middle of the night once i reveal my true nature to you please leave your candelabra on the little ledge by the portcullis we are running out of them

neenarchive

starting to think these maidens are stumbling in soaked through from the rain just to steal my beautiful gowns and homewear are any of you actually lost

elektrashocktherapy

At the checkout in Home Goods loading the belt with nothing but candelabras in all shapes & sizes while the cashier watches sympathetically and asks if it’s the maidens again

so-i-did-this-thing

Very cool antique tophat case my mother gave me. Interior is cardboard covered in satin, with an exterior leather shell. Fastening strap with other half of lock hardware sadly missing, but the interior clasp is intact!

Debating how far I want to go on a restoration. Probably just get a bit of moisture back in, tack up thr torn strap keeper, and give the whole thing a light wax.

so-i-did-this-thing

Spent a little time with a few leather balms to get some oils back to the hatbox. You can already see more nuance & richness in the color, plus the start of some shine. Also neat to see the previous owner's name -- J. O. Swinford.

Working with dry rotted leather can be tricky, because it has the texture of dry cardboard, and over-oiling it can make it feel like soggy cardboard.

Dry rot means the piece is doomed to being a display piece, but you can still get it looking nicer while retaining a neat patina.

Last step will be to add a light layer of wax and give everything a good buff.

#antiques #antique #so i found this thing

Saw this in a recent Antique shop rummage and Thought Of You, as they say :D

Ha! I have actually considered buying one for funsies. 😅

#antiques #antique #I am pretty easy to read lol

karadenizin

Hilda has shelly hoof, and Siegfried, he also doesn't feel so good

#acgas 2020 #audrey hall #siegfried farnon #audrey x siegfried

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WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN