The Legend of J

Trans rights are human rights! 🏳️‍⚧️ She/Her Rebellious acts, rainbows, minimalism and dreams. Chaotic Good. Nuance is necessary. This blog is a sex-positive only zone! (And that includes supporting those who don’t want it! Aces! ) Be excellent to each other!

[glumshoe]

Art forgery is the best crime tbh. It requires absolutely incredible artistic talent, technical skill, and attention to detail to make convincing fakes. Does anyone get hurt from it? No! The only people who suffer for it are the extremely wealthy who want the prestige of having original paintings in their own homes. It’s full of international intrigue and mystery. Perfect.

[glumshoe]

Also… art forgers like van Meegeren sometimes become a kind of folk hero. A swindler, sure, but a gentleman’s swindler.

[cipherface-deactivated20200224]

I liked this guy’s story, Mark Landis, who conned several dozen museums into displaying his forgeries, but when the FBI came after him they couldn’t do anything because he had always given them away as donations. They said if they could have found that he’d ever taken anything in exchange they would have prosecuted him, but all he wanted was get to out of the house and meet people.

[glumshoe]

“The first painting Landis “donated” was a copy of a work by Maynard Dixon, an artist well-known for his paintings of cowboys and Indians. It started as impulse, Landis says, but then “everybody was just so nice and treated me with respect and deference and friendship, things I was very unused to — I mean, actually not used to at all. And I got addicted to it.”” And it looks like all his forgeries are done with cheap materials, like markers and Hobby Lobby frames.

[skweebs]

Ok, but Wolfgang Beltracchi is probably one of the best Fraud Artists in the world.

His career brought him millions upon millions of dollars and lasted almost 40 years. He finally admitted to painting fraudulent art after the white paint he used came under scrutiny. 

“ Bob Simon: What do you think this Max Ernst would be worth? Wolfgang Beltracchi: This one? Simon: Yeah. Beltracchi: $5 million, I think. Simon: $5 million.  And you can do it in three days? Beltracchi: Yeah, oh yes, yes, sure, or quicker” -From a 60 minutes interview with Bob Simon

In The interview with Beltracchi, he said that none of his forgeries are copies, they’re all original works that the famous artists could have painted.

“Beltracchi estimates he has done 25 Max Ernsts. He is not copying an existing work. He’s painting something he thinks Ernst might have done if he’d had the time or felt like it.”  -  The Con Artist: A multi-million dollar art scam

His wife was also in on the scam, she would dress up in old clothing and take pictures holding the paintings with old cameras to fake proof of the paintings’ ages.

At the end of the interview with Wolfgang Beltracchi he was asked if he felt he had done anything wrong, his answer was “ Yeah, I used the wrong kind of paint”

[out-there-on-the-maroon]

Just … the levels of con there, the fake photos and … wow. That’s incredible. 

[pervocracy]

How to hack any hospital computer

-Use the password taped to the monitor

How to hack any hospital computer (L337 version for advanced security systems)

-Use the password taped to the back of the monitor

[dysgraphicprogrammer]

As a computer guy: This is what happens when you have too much security. It reaches a tipping point and then suddenly you have none. Security at the cost of convenience comes at the cost of security.  

[pervocracy]

This is true of so many things in healthcare.  Example: our software is designed to automatically alert the doctor if a patient’s vital signs are critically out of range.  If someone has a blood pressure of 200/130, the doc gets a pop-up box that they have to acknowledge before doing anything else.  It makes sense, in our setting.

But then some mega-genius upstairs realized something: the system was only alerting for critical vital signs, but not for all vital signs that could possibly be bad.  Like, yeah, 200/130 is potentially life-threatening, but 130/90 is above ideal and can have negative effects on health.  Should the doctors be allowed to just ignore something that could negatively affect a patient’s health?  Heavens no!

So now the system generates a pop-up for any vital signs that are even slightly abnormal.  A pressure of 120/80 (once considered textbook normal, now considered slightly high) will create the pop-up.  We have increased our vigilance!

Well, no, what we’ve actually done is train doctors to click through a constant bombardment of pop-ups without looking.  We’ve destroyed their vigilance and made it much easier for them to accidentally skim past life-threatening vital signs.

But you can’t tell that to management, because you’d have to confess that you are a flawed human with limited attention resources.  They’d tell you “well, all the other doctors take every abnormal vital sign seriously, it sounds like you’re being negligent.”  And if you’re smart, you back down before you start telling the big boss all about your habit of ignoring critical safety alerts.

The end result is exactly the same as if we had no alerts at all, except with more annoying clicking.

[master-of-the-game]

Worf plays timpani. I just cannot imagine him playing any other instrument... Continuation of the Orchestra Series. For those who want to participate in discussion about this AU, please join here, you are very welcome, I read everything and I am grateful for all ideas and knowledge you provide there :)

[unamccormack]

These always delight!

[pawpunkao3]

Unhealthy ships in a fandom are a bioindicator. They're like finding caterpillars on your produce. You may not want to consume them---you may even find them disgusting---but if they aren't there at all, you know that stuff is COVERED in toxicity.

[tf2heritageposts]

did u go protest today

good evening officer

[tf2heritageposts]

don’t tell social media if you went to protests or not(especially if you didn’t), don’t give cops an easy way to track down protesters. punk life advice

[ao3cassandraic]

Just reblogging this. No reason.

[spoookiepie]

👻🎃

[what-even-is-thiss]

As an adult you must cultivate the skill of “Gross! Oh, well. Not my business.”

[what-even-is-thiss]

Applies to everything from BDSM parties to your sister’s godawful interior design choices to weird bachelor pad meals eaten over a sink.

Gross! Oh, well. Not my business.

[autumngracy]

[thememedaddy]

[astraltrickster]

Personally, I'd love to see the original study and see if it was controlled for income (or redo it controlled for income if it wasn't), because I can think of multiple other reasons that owning a horse might correlate with behaviors that make someone live longer:

You're more likely to spend time outdoors hanging out with your horse

Horse owners are often into any number of equestrian sports, at least on a hobby level, and those are good exercise for the humans too (even just trail riding!)

Taking care of a horse involves A LOT of routine physical labor; even if you hire someone to do most of it the owner still usually does An Amount of it - a single horse usually demands enough work to keep someone active but not so much they'll end up destroying themself with repetitive strain

Caring for a horse demands learning a lot about how to look out for their health; some of this information does also help humans

Horse owners are likely to keep carrots and apples around as a healthy snack for both humans AND horses

And probably several more! Especially since this study was looking at women, and the way women are discouraged from being overly physical has been identified as a reason that women are more likely to face age-related mobility loss.

In other words: the conclusion seems obvious but we actually need a lot more information!

[runawaymarbles]

I think that like. Look. I don't really want to get into an arugment about the ethics of violent action. But I will say that from a stance of pure messaging, going up against black bloc protestors gives law enforcement a chance to look cool and tough and macho. But trying to fight a bunch of guys in inflatable frog suits doing the cha-cha slide makes them look like fucking morons. Especially when they have to go on TV and act like the guys in frog suits are a national security threat. They look like little babies that are scared of sports mascots, and the longer they do it the more support they lose.

[runawaymarbles]

He was in the capitol on January 6th but he's scared of something Seattleites take their children to see every summer solstice.

[our-queer-experience]

helen “trans people are perpetuating gender steriotypes” joyce is now upset that the scientific american is writing about how women were hunters too back in the day, not just mothers and caretakers. feminist win!

[the-gummy-worms-have-me]

I think I found the article!

The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong

The influential idea that in the past men were hunters and women were not isn’t supported by the available evidence

Read it if you have the time, it's very interesting.

[mikkeneko]

Reading the article I see why TERFs are mad about it; it explicitly makes the distinction between gender as a social entity and sex as a biological category, and defines biological sex having multiple factors, both of which are anathema to TERF philosophy.

It also includes these fascinating paragraphs about the role of estrogen in different types of physical activity, directly debunking the widespread notion that estrogen is the weak human's hormone and only does weak human things:

Given the fitness world's persistent touting of the hormone testosterone for athletic success, you'd be forgiven for not knowing that estrogen, which females typically produce more of than males, plays an incredibly important role in athletic performance… The estrogen receptor—the protein that estrogen binds to in order to do its work—is deeply ancient. Joseph Thornton of the University of Chicago and his colleagues have estimated that it is around 1.2 billion to 600 million years old—roughly twice as old as the testosterone receptor. In addition to helping regulate the reproductive system, estrogen influences fine-motor control and memory, enhances the growth and development of neurons, and helps to prevent hardening of the arteries. Important for the purposes of this discussion, estrogen also improves fat metabolism. During exercise, estrogen seems to encourage the body to use stored fat for energy before stored carbohydrates. Fat contains more calories per gram than carbohydrates do, so it burns more slowly, which can delay fatigue during endurance activity. Not only does estrogen encourage fat burning, but it also promotes greater fat storage within muscles… which makes that fat's energy more readily available. Adiponectin, another hormone that is typically present in higher amounts in females than in males, further enhances fat metabolism while sparing carbohydrates for future use, and it protects muscle from breakdown. Anne Friedlander of Stanford University and her colleagues found that females use as much as 70 percent more fat for energy during exercise than males. Estrogen's ability to increase fat metabolism and regulate the body's response to the hormone insulin can help prevent muscle breakdown during intense exercise. Furthermore, estrogen appears to have a stabilizing effect on cell membranes that might otherwise rupture from acute stress brought on by heat and exercise. Ruptured cells release enzymes called creatine kinases, which can damage tissues… Linda Lamont of the University of Rhode Island and her colleagues, as well as Michael Riddell of York University in Canada and his colleagues, found that females experienced less muscle breakdown than males after the same bouts of exercise. Tellingly, in a separate study, Mazen J. Hamadeh of York University and his colleagues found that males supplemented with estrogen suffered less muscle breakdown during cycling than those who didn't receive estrogen supplements.

The article also talks about sexual dimorphism in different species, concluding that "Modern humans have low sexual dimorphism compared with the other great apes," and that overemphasis on averages obscures the wide dispersal of individual traits, which is what I keep saying.

[aethersea]

Anthropologists also look at damage on our ancestors' skeletons for clues to their behavior. Neandertals are the best-studied extinct members of the human family because we have a rich fossil record of their remains. Neandertal females and males do not differ in their trauma patterns, nor do they exhibit sex differences in pathology from repetitive actions. Their skeletons show the same patterns of wear and tear. This finding suggests that they were doing the same things, from ambush-hunting large game animals to processing hides for leather. Yes, Neandertal women were spearing woolly rhinoceroses, and Neandertal men were making clothing.

I also thought this part was cool :)

[genderqueerdykes]

PLEASE read this article, this information is incredible for everyone looking to unlearn bioessentialism

[anti-terf-posts]

official anti terf post

[ampervadasz]

Unmute !

[unashamedly-enthusiastic]

I watched this without sound and it was just so happy and joyful I knew it could only get better with the music

And I was right

[pheita]

Memo to everybody :

Never be afraid to recycle an idea you had for a WIP you abandoned. Sometimes the idea needs a different set of characters or a different setting.

[indecisive-behaviors]

An addition:

Never be afraid to recycle an idea you had for a project you already completed. Sometimes ideas really are just that good and deserve to be used more than once.

[pikestaff]

"Stop saying 15 year olds with weird interests are cringe, they're 15" this is true however you should also stop saying adults with weird interests are cringe because who gives a shit

[themythicalcodfish]

To wit:

[switchelsweets]

I want to share some wisdom from my high school art teacher.

In my AP Art class, there was a girl who was just starting to experiment with mixed media. At this point she was still playing around, trying to decide what direction she wanted to go with her portfolio. So one critique day, she brought in an abstract canvas with some rhinestone highlights and painted and real peacock feathers. She loved sparkles and peacock feathers so she thought she’d try introducing them a *little*. And after everyone had given some input, the teacher gave her his advice, VERY roughly paraphrased here:

“So here’s the thing… I do not like this style. These are just elements that do not speak to me personally, but I see that you like them, and you’re doing interesting things with them.

“My biggest critique is, I only merely *dislike* this piece. I want you to make me HATE it. Go crazy with the things that you like. Don’t hold back trying to make it palatable to people like me. Because I am NEVER going to like it. And if the audience does not like it, it should drive them crazy seeing how much YOU love it.”

Her portfolio was chock full of neon colors and glitter and rhinestones and splashes of peacock feathers and it was a delight. Our teacher despised every piece lol, but she got great marks and I think even won some awards. And more importantly, she was happy and proud of the results. Because she didn’t limit herself by trying to appeal to people who were never going to enjoy what she enjoyed.

Takeaway here: be as cringe as you want. Don’t limit yourself based on other ppl’s tastes. They’re not you, and you are incredible 💕

[magnuspeccatori]

This is the most inspirational thing I've read all week. Possibly all year

[cipheramnesia]

I know everything is shit fucked sixteen ways before lunch time, but it remains a fact that you should not trust anyone who wants you to feel like the whole world hates you all the time. That's a person trying to sell you something, swallow you whole, or bleed you dry. Especially those times when it feels like they're right.

No one wants anything good from you who wants you always feeling scared and hated. They will wear you out and leave you in the bin the second fashions change. Things are extremely high levels of fucked, but you are not hated like that. It's scary and isolating but you are not alone like that. Worst case, come and shiver like a wet dog with me, I won't say anything and we can dry out.

[bobzillashiftwoods]

(I do not do commissions)

[glitchartistscollective]

Work by @bobzillashiftwoods

source: tumblr @bobzillashiftwoods

[olderthannetfic]

No, no, and NO.

AO3 does not live in “the cloud” because that is other people’s computers, and other people’s computers are vulnerable to censorship.

AO3 is on its own computers. It does still have to be housed somewhere, and I suppose a determined enough hater could try to find that place and go after it, but it’s a lot harder than sending spurious complaints to Amazon or whomever going “BadWrong things are hosted on your cloud service!”

Owning the servers is a core tenet of OTW/AO3.

[zz9pzza]

Warming up a new database server….

[elfwreck]

When people involved with AO3 talk about “the cost of servers” they don’t mean “the cost to pay Amazon for space on their servers.” They mean, like, the cost to physically own them, and eventually replace them with new ones. And the operating costs to run them.

AO3 is not “in the cloud.” AO3 is stored on physical machines that the OTW owns.

While this is not a solution that can work for everyone who wants to deal with controversial content, it is why AO3ple sneer at alt-righters who complain about getting thrown off hosting platforms.

[kingpretty]

Me n who

[autumngracy]

This could be us but the US government won't let disabled people marry each other without losing their disability benefits 💕