#technical failure

[theatrestories]

Grease

Hello! A funny blooper happened in a production of Grease that I was in. I was in the chorus and we were doing our first dress rehearsal. We got to the song We Go Together, everything was going well to this point. The producer decided to add in Sonny pulling down Eugene's pants to show his funny underwear during a dance break by Eugene. However, the boy playing Sonny pulled it down too far making the boy playing Eugene butt naked to us and well.. you get the story! We couldn't stop laughing as were shocked by the situation which meant we laughed throughout the rest of the song. 

The boy playing Eugene laughs about it now. Luckily the boy who played Sonny knew the boy playing Eugene as they go to the same school or else it would be a bit awkward between them. It never happened after that luckily as we changed it to shorts and made sure they were tight enough not to fall down even more.

(Submitted by @thewickedexpress )

[theatrestories]

Princess and the Pea

A tale I heard after-the-fact: my first high school’s drama club was putting on a presentation of The Princess and the Pea, and there is a scene part-way through where a knight and his horse (represented in this case by some guy with a pair of coconuts, in tried-and-true Monty Python style) are chasing the princess through the woods. The crew had come up with a handful of fake trees that would be lowered on to the stage, but on one showing, a bunch of the trees got stuck and wouldn’t lower all the way, so they had to do the scene with only two of them. “Didn’t there used to be a tree here?” the horse had said, and the ensuing chase became quite absurd, as the princess had to keep hiding behind the same two trees to stall for time.

(submitted by @weaselsblaugh )

[slypuzzle]

The Vanishing of Flight MH370

Investigate the unexplained disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in 2014. Delve into the search operations, debris findings, and conspiracy theories.

[youthchronical]

'Technical failure' caused copter crash killing Raisi: State media - Times of India

The deaths of Prez Ebrahim Raisi and foreign minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian leave Iran without two influential figures at a particularly tumultuous moment of international tension and domestic discontent, although analysts and regional officials expect little change in Iran’s foreign or domestic policies.Raisi, 63, and Abdollahian were killed Sunday in a helicopter crash resulting from a…

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[itsmadhvi]

Failures of Artificial Intelligence

Nick Bostrom is a Swedish philosopher. In 2002, he said something about Artificial Intelligence that could break your confidence and trust in AI. He has said that the excess use of AI could permanently damage human intelligence and inbuild potentialities. He calls this “Existential catastrophe”. For explaining this, he has talked about two failures of AI. The first is Technical Failure and the…

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[hypexion]

Something I recently learned about the endless well of terrible ideas and magical thinking that is “EnEffTees“ is that these tokens can have an actual executable program attached to them. A program that can be configured to run if you interact with the token in any way. Depending on how you interact with them, that could be enough for them to excute in their entirety.

This is, from a security standpoint, a complete and total disaster. Software companies have been working for decades to ensure that user’s computers don’t get hijacked just because they looked at an email. The reason Windows asks you if you’re really sure you want a program to be able to make changes to your computer is to protect you from malware. A significant part of cybersecurity is making sure that only users authorized to perform an action can perform it. If you can’t do something you should be able to do, that’s bad. If you can do something you shouldn’t be able to do, that’s often worse.

But in the wild west of cryptocrumbs, it seems like every best practice needs to be relearned from scratch. Now all those ugly pictures generated by mashing the randomize button on a Sonic the Hedgehog character creator can be extracted with the right know-how. And these evil tokens can be dropped into any wallet. Probably ones that a malicious actor has scoped out in advanced to see if they contain the coveted Sonic OCs. Or enough magic internet money to make the whole thing worth it.

The silver-lining to this dark cloud of terrible insecurity is that these token-programs are only executed on the chain of blocks. Your computer and its files are safe from evil tokens. At least until someone high on their own vision of a questionable future creates a way to bridge that gap.

[hypexion]

So why have the Tumblr staff removed the horizontal rule selection from the rich text editor? The entire platform runs on ye olde HyperText Markup Language, so I can just get it by jumping through a trivial yet annoying hoop. Behold:

Merely via switching to the Markdown editor and typing three asterisks, I have summoned the horizontal rule. I could also switch to the HTML editor and just add the HTML for a horizontal rule.

This is probably the terrible brain-child of an overpaid UX designer. The true nemisis of Common Sense and Decency, here to ruin eveything.

But I did realise that I can add alt-text to images, which I'm sure can be used for funnies.

[theatrestories]

you don’t appreciate what’s there until it’s gone

I feel that no mishap I have ever had in theatre will ever come as good as this fail

So in 2017, I was in this children’s production of Aladdin. I didn’t have a major role but I did have the joy of being on stage the entire hour and a half show. Anyway, the music person wasn’t going to be there for the whole two week run and the venue was small, so because of this all the music was pre recorded and the wifi connected the music to the speakers. 

Only issue? This venue had unique wifi. So start of act two the whole cast was onstage and we were ready for the act 2 opening song- which the cast had opinions about lol. We waited, and waited for the opening song and I just wanted to get it over and done with because the song was a bit high for me and made me faint. 

What I heard I wasn’t the opening notes to the song, but the frantic slamming of the button- the wifi had cut out and the laptop couldn’t connect to the speaker. Lucky the girl with the line after the song continued with the scene, however we didn’t have sound for half of the second act. We had to completely bludge the second half while masking our confusion and everything felt so awkward without sound. I’m pretty sure I just wanted to be off that stage at this point. 

The worst part- before that show, the guy doing sound was talking about leaving us hanging on that song. I consider this one of the worst things to happen to me on stage, but me and a few others have some inside jokes relating to it and I’m pretty sure it’s gone into urban legend at the community theatre.

(Submitted by Ava)