Girls in swamp
insta: _fiyeli

ellievsbear
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Game of Thrones Daily
AnasAbdin
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sheepfilms

JBB: An Artblog!
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Misplaced Lens Cap
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
almost home
KIROKAZE
trying on a metaphor

blake kathryn

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
we're not kids anymore.
Cosmic Funnies
One Nice Bug Per Day
dirt enthusiast
seen from Malaysia
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@solidaritetwatson
Girls in swamp
insta: _fiyeli
A shepherd in abandoned Sacred Grove, Herbert List, Italy, 1952
Nasty and sophisticated scam: BEWARE of this!
If an email recently landed in your inbox with a subject line like "Pending charge of USD 987.90 for account activation. Questions? Call 855
Don’t get caught off guard by this. It’s quite a slick one.
What to actually do If you get one of these, the answer is boring and it works every time: Don't call the number. Don't reply. Don't click links in the email — not even the unsubscribe link. Open a fresh browser tab, type paypal.com yourself, and log into your account. Check your activity. You'll see either nothing, or a tiny incoming payment from a stranger that you can ignore. Then forward the original email as an attachment to [email protected] and delete it. If you want to go a step further, report the phone number to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov — every report makes it slightly harder for these operations to keep running. And if you've already called? Don't beat yourself up — these scams are designed by professionals to fool smart people. Hang up, run a malware scan if you installed anything they asked you to install, change your PayPal and bank passwords from a different device, and call your bank's real fraud line (the number on the back of your card) to flag your accounts. Move fast, but you don't need to panic.
from the above linked article. For the UK the email to forward phishing scams to is [email protected], texts can be forwarded on to 7726 (for free!) and as a victim of fraud you can report it here (or here for Scotland)
— If an email recently landed in your inbox with a subject line like "Pending charge of USD 987.90 for account activation. Questions? Call (855) 629-1161" — don't call that number. Don't click anything. And whatever you do, don't panic-dial to "stop the charge."
You're being targeted by one of the cleverest scams going right now, and the reason it works is uncomfortable: the email genuinely came from PayPal.
The trick is in the subject line, not the email
When most people think "phishing email," they picture sketchy senders, broken English, and links to weird domains. This scam is the opposite. The email passes every authenticity check — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, all green. It comes from PayPal's actual mail servers. The fonts are right. The footer is right. The unsubscribe link works. If you forwarded it to a security expert and asked "is this really from PayPal?" they'd have to say yes.
So how is it a scam?
Scammers have figured out that PayPal lets anyone send small amounts of money to anyone else, and that PayPal will dutifully email the recipient a notification. The scammer sends you a payout of, say, one Hungarian forint — about a quarter of a cent. PayPal's system then automatically generates and sends you a real, legitimate, fully-authenticated email confirming the transaction.
Here's the catch: the email's subject line is whatever the scammer typed when they set up the payout. PayPal doesn't sanitize it. So they write something terrifying like "Pending charge of USD 987.90 — call this number with questions" and PayPal's servers cheerfully deliver that subject line straight to your inbox, wrapped in a perfectly legitimate-looking notification.
The actual transaction in the email body is for 1 forint. There is no $987.90 charge. There never was. But by the time most people read carefully enough to notice that, they've already dialed the number. —
Did you know that after they switched to blind auditions, major symphony orchestras hired women between 30% to 55% more? Before bringing in “blind auditions” with a screen to conceal the the candidate, women in the top 5 major orchestras made up less than 5% of the musicians performing.
so I believe it was actually more complicated than that, in interesting ways. Because at first, when they did blind auditions, they were STILL hiring more men.
…Then they put down a carpet, so that high heels didn’t clack on the floor, and BOOM women were suddenly getting hired.
The testers didn’t even know that’s what they were picking up on, which just goes to show how tiny of a cue it takes for misogyny to kick in.
The case of blind auditions for orchestras and how it dramatically changed the gender makeup of orchestras is a very illuminating example of gender bias, and an interesting possible way of countering it.
You can be sexist without knowing it. You can be racist without knowing it. This is not a moral failing; it is a moral imperative to remember that you are fallible, and take steps to limit the damage your squishy ape brain’s foibles can cause.
The final chapter in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (2005) describes this in detail.
What you don’t usually hear about when discussing this blind audition process is that after the blind auditions were implemented, when women had gotten many positions in the orchestra, men no longer saw being a member as prestigious and the salaries for the entire orchestra dropped.
i keep seeing discourse about it so for funsies:
how many books do you usually read per year?
0-5
5-10
10-20
20-30
30-40
40-50
50-60
60-70
70-80
80-100
100+
varies/I don't keep track of that/other
My Fitness Coach is a Dark Wizard [Complete]
Bought my uncle a burger and milkshake in exchange for letting me disrupt the holiest day of the week, NFL Sunday Football, so I could install a Pi-hole and free the household of ads...the thing abt the specific boomers I live with is they told me not to trust people on the Internet but they do not understand the algorithm or online advertising and think that Facebook has their best interests at heart. And every time I have tried to explain to them that no, blorbo from my dashboard is not selling my kidneys on the dark web but Google from your capitalism is definitely selling your web searches to every advertising company on the planet, they think I am paranoid. How could their personal friend Mark Zuckerberg want anything bad to happen to them etc. I am fighting battles I did not know existed!!!
Update I have had Pi-Hole successfully installed for two (2) hours and have since learned that 40% of the web traffic in this household went to advertisements. FORTY FUCKING PERCENT. We live in hell. This is the greatest gift I have ever given my family that they will not understand or acknowledge or feel any gratitude for.
Update #2: it was rising all night but the number it finally settled on was...60%. 60% of the web traffic in this household went to advertisements. I can't tell if this high number is bc I live in Silicon Valley and probably am subject to the Algorithmic Internet in ways people outside of Silicon Valley are not or it is normal to have 2/3rds of your web traffic be ads, but it did make me set up a recurring donation of the EFF lmfao.
Okay I have had multiple people ask, so here are the useful websites that me and Beryl used to muddle our way through:
Using Pi-hole and Raspberry Pi (on the Raspberry Pi website, really good overview of what Pi-hole does)
Tumblr-archived Twitter thread about one household's experience with Pi-hole (this is what sold me on it. Also the tweets were published in 2022 and Pi-hole is actively being developed, so I think some of the teething problems he mentioned might have cleared up or are at least being addressed.)
Pi-hole website (gives broad strokes of the software and imho is not actually that helpful, however this proves that I am not making shit up)
Pi-hole documentation (read prerequisites carefully, you do NOT need the newest model of Raspberry Pi to run this thing!! You don't even need a Raspberry Pi at all, you can run it on a bunch of Linux systems however I'm very stupid when it comes to Linux and when my options are install and learn a whole ass new OS or spend $$ on a Raspberry Pi and hook it up to my TV with a wired mouse and keyboard I will unfortunately be spending money)
Privacy International's guide to setting up Pi-hole on a Raspberry Pi (bro this one saved our asses)
You guys can ask me questions if you want but I guarantee I will not know the answers bc I don't know shit about fuck, I just followed the directions and reaped the rewards. It did take us 2 hours to set up bc I'm bad at following directions (and it's kind of complicated if you've been out of the software game for a while like I have), and you do have to be sososo brave about fucking around with your internet provider's configuration. So make sure you eat before you do it!! However it has been so worth it for me so far, given that now all my devices at home are running faster and I'm not seeing any ads while web browsing. We will see what complaints my family comes up with, but I love it so far.
Also!! if you've never heard of Raspberry Pi, which I realize are not all of my followers are lost in the Silicon Valley sauce so you might not have, here's is their website and their page for using Raspberry Pi at home.
(And here is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that fights for digital privacy, free speech, and innovation, if you, like me, were presented with cold hard data about your personal internet usage and suddenly realized that our internet is fully a dystopia. haha.)
After a few months with pi-hole, I recently switched to AdGuard Home. It was recommended/is co-promoted in a pi-hole discord server, and it seems to be blocking a bit more successfully/consistently for me than the pi-hole did.
I also use Blokada on my phone when I'm not home and have the Windscribe browser extension which includes 10GB of free VPN traffic and has uBlock integrated into it. (AdGuard does technically make things that do this but I like those better; ymmv).
It all takes some setup and tinkering, but I highly, highly recommend taking steps to clear out some of the internet garbage and protect your info.
haven't done a comic in AGES but i whipped this up for a buddy's 4 panel comic anthology (submissions open til june 1st! i had a really fun time making this, recommend 👍)
Linda Pearlman Karlsberg - Sunset, Fort Tryon, 2025 - Oil on canvas
How to Fix Underwriting
1. Slow down at emotionally important moments.
Big emotions need space to land. If a scene feels rushed, pause the plot briefly to show how the moment affects the character.
2. Add reactions, not explanations.
Instead of explaining what a character feels, show it through physical responses, hesitation, or small actions that reveal emotion naturally.
3. Ground every scene in the senses.
If a scene feels thin, add one or two sensory details—sound, texture, smell, or temperature—to make the moment feel lived-in.
4. Let thoughts interrupt action.
A line of internal thought can deepen a scene without slowing it too much. Thoughts show stakes, fear, longing, or conflict beneath the action.
5. Expand consequences, not events.
You don’t need more things to happen—you need to show what matters. Focus on how events change relationships, decisions, or self-perception.
6. Strengthen setting where emotion peaks.
The environment should echo or contrast the emotion of the scene. Setting is not decoration—it’s emotional reinforcement.
7. Add specific details instead of general ones.
Underwriting often relies on vague language. Swap “they argued” for one sharp line of dialogue or a specific breaking point.
8. Let dialogue breathe.
Short dialogue exchanges without pauses can feel flat. Add beats—silence, gestures, interruptions—to give the conversation weight.
9. Show transitions between scenes.
If scenes jump too quickly, readers feel disoriented. A brief transition helps establish time, mood, and emotional continuity.
10. Clarify stakes early in the scene.
If readers don’t know what can be lost, scenes feel empty. Make sure the character wants something specific and fears losing it.
11. Use the “what are they feeling right now?” check.
After each major beat, ask what emotion is dominant in that moment. If it’s missing on the page, the scene is likely underwritten.
12. Expand scenes that feel “too clean.”
If a scene resolves too neatly or quickly, it probably needs more tension. Messy emotions and unresolved feelings add depth.
Today? Another harrowhark. Tomorrow? Take a wild guess
by David Hockney
reading a good interesting book after a horrible reading slump and suddenly you can feel the sun shining again and the sky is more beautiful than ever and birds are all singing songs to you