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Hey. If people aren't aware, Microsoft admitted they know who you and where you are at all times and will give your info to the police.

They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.

Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.

You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.

This article specifically notes:

For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesn’t care which VPN you use, only that it’s still the same Windows installation.

GDID is the persistent Windows ID that helped FBI trace a Scattered Spider hacker despite VPNs. Here's how it works and how to limit it.

Other important quotes:

What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows “surveillance software”.

Two things back that up:

There’s no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Apple’s advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Android’s works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.

Then there’s activation. Massgrave, the group behind Microsoft Activation Scripts, notes that Windows setup sends hardware info to Microsoft and gets identifiers back, the same tokens later used for Store access and licensing: “It’s impossible to prevent Windows from getting a GDID without breaking activation and UWP app[s].” Anyone who lost a license after swapping a motherboard has already met a smaller version of this.

Here's the complaint filed to the court, the primary source for the case mentioned in the article. You can find mentions of GDID on page 30 of the document or 34 of the PDF.

Thank you @just-call-me-zinnia for finding it!

fluentisonus

it feels so evil that you can't still access your university online library after you graduate *remembers my principles* it feels so evil that everyone can't access to that stuff all the time

hollyevolving

That is very true.

If it's of any help, jstor allows individual users to register for free Independent Researcher accounts with access to 100 documents per month.

muffinlance

it WHAT

spaghettiwoman46

Ugh they are always doing this

keepcalmandcarriefischer

Little freaks

mrsterlingeverything

Um actually scrub daddy is my comfort character and it physically and psychically hurts me to see you chop him up and eat him after freezing and cracking him up with liquid nitrogen while naked with big boobs?

mousemilf

dont worry abt it, you just keep reading your lines and well take care of the rest. you'll be a star.

mrsterlingeverything

Ill be a star

ben-makes-art

Hornet vs. Kumoko

Battle of the Spider Girls!

Twitter>>

Bsky>>

casket-of-beauty

red-mercer

People who sculpt in marble do fabrics and shit just to flex don’t they

paulsebert

Marble is a medium in which you can be horny on main and everyone’s like “wow that’s classy.”

alexaloraetheris

I think having skills to construct flesh out of stone gives you as much right to be horny on main as any creator god.

honourablejester

Antonio Frilli (1860-1902), apparently. Looking through some of his other sculptures, he was just really good at fabrics in general.

theoutcastrogue

Fun fact, when you look at a marble sculpture, and they tell you the sculptor’s name is [X], you don’t have enough information yet to know if [X] really sculpted what you see, or if they only sculpted the original in clay, and somebody else (unnamed and unsung) did the jaw-dropping marble job. Maybe it’s the same person, maybe it’s not. Maybe a whole workshop worth of people were involved.

Bronze sculptures are cast. Someone makes a clay original, someone makes a mold, someone uses the mold to cast the bronze. It’s probably not the same person who does all that. It probably takes several people in several workshops to do all that, it’s an industry. But only one of them gets called “the artist”. The same mold can produce infinite (theoretically) copies, but we don’t call them copies, we call them original castings.

The Thinker, by Auguste Rodin, exhibited at the Musée Rodin, in Paris. “There are 27 other known full-sized castings, though not all were made during Rodin’s lifetime and under his supervision.” [photo by CrisNYCa, Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0]

But if someone constructs an identical mold elsewhere, and makes an identical bronze statue, then suddenly it’s a copy, and not “original”.

A portrait (painting or photograph) is by definition a collaboration between artist and model, but only one of them gets the artistic credit. It takes work from thousands of people to make a movie, but the Oscar for best film goes to the producer, and the authorship goes to the director.

In film photography, the photographer is the person who operates the camera. Developing and printing the negative is considered secondary. And yet, it is widely acknowledged that printing a film is FAR from a mechanical process. Ansel Adams put it this way: “Fine prints are like a musical performance. The negative is the composer’s score and the print is the performance.” He should know. One of his many iconic photos is “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico”, taken in 1941. Over the years he made ~1300 prints of it, and they’re different.

[by Ansel Adams for the US Department of the Interior, Public Domain]

Mr. Adams’s later prints of “Moonrise, Hernandez” show a darker sky and a more brilliant light on the cemetery crosses than earlier prints, one dealer notes. Mr. Szarkowski of New York’s Museum of Modern Art says, “There has been a general change away from a lyrical feeling to a more dramatic print, a higher emotional pitch. The images printed during the 1960s are quite different from those of the 1930s.”

So what happens when one person presses the button and another person develops and prints the film? This is how photojournalism worked all through the 20th century, especially photojournalists working abroad or far away from base: they didn’t carry a dark room with them, obviously, and time was of the essence, so they sent the negatives by post to their agency, newspaper or magazine, and someone else printed them. Sebastião Salgado (a GIANT of documentary photography, you know his pictures even if you’ve never heard of him) sent them to his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado. As far as he’s concerned they are a team, and the work is a collaboration. But the authorship is always the photographer’s, and the copyright is always the agency’s, and it never occurred to anyone to officially acknowledge other people’s contributions, which can be vital.

(Digital photography has similar issues with processing the raw image, though by now processing can be done in situ, and often is. But agencies and publications still have editors who can alter the photos, and whose work is artistically unacknowledged.)

Art is FULL of conventions like that. Some of them are ridiculous, some of them make some sense, in context, some are even useful, occasionally, but NONE should be taken too seriously, or too literally.

NONE should blind you to the fact that the concept of authorship and the line between original and copy are both imaginary constructs, a matter of consensus in artistic circles (and their respective markets, and cultural/educational institutions), rather than any concrete fact or material reality. We are not beholden to this consensus, we can accept it or resist it, as we see fit.

NONE should blind you to the fact that even art made by a single person working in a basement all by their lonesome is, at the end of the day, art created by a community, a society, a culture. The person in the basement wouldn’t be able to create jackshit if they weren’t part of a community, a society, a culture, if they hadn’t been exposed to the art of others, if they didn’t have access to tools and materials others made, and to techniques others used before them, if being part of humanity hadn’t inspired them to do what humans do, and make some fucking art.

The charcoal handprints and animal drawings that decorated caves thirty thousand years ago are still affecting art made today, with technology, materials and techniques the cave-dwellers couldn’t begin to fathom. Art that’s been lost for thousands of years still affects art made today, because it molded people’s aesthetics, and aesthetics get inherited and live on. Everything’s derivative and the ripples are still going. And they will keep going, for as long as humans exist.

Isn’t that incredibly beautiful? Isn’t it awesome how everything is derivative, and one way or another collaborative? Isn’t it brilliant how art connects humans across eons? Isn’t asking for authenticity and originality so utterly pointless? Isn’t it narrow-minded to claim that exclusive authorship exists at all? And isn’t it so insufferably petty?

veliseraptor

i am terminally A Sucker for characters who have a towering and generally earned ego about their own ability and absolutely no self-worth about themselves as a person at all. intoxicating combo.

epicsause-official

was on the wikipedia page for charleston red rice and i noticed the photo they used was blurry. i went to the talk page to see if this was brought up and stumbled upon this banger of a conversation

melodeelaine

Kingfisher and Great Egret lined up just right

blazing-butterfly-inactive

@notsospiteful I like the way you think

dustbowl-es

the word love is so good as an exaggeration. in the same vein as saying something will literally kill me. glad thats all it was made up for

truelovevip-deactivated20190324

being as i am an idiot, and having been one my whole life, i just wanna say that i find it very easy to do nothing, and go nowhere. i eat chocolate late at night in the dark. i stand in the garden also. and i’m often waiting for something to happen. and i’m stupid.

louisegluckpdf

i think every publisher should have to institute a ban on books that fail what i’m calling the “little life” and “what else?” tests

louisegluckpdf

for reference.

orcboxer

"When I taught creative writing at Princeton, [my students] had been told all of their lives to write what they knew. I always began the course by saying, “Don’t pay any attention to that.” First, because you don’t know anything and second, because I don’t want to hear about your true love and your mama and your papa and your friends. Think of somebody you don’t know. What about a Mexican waitress in the Rio Grande who can barely speak English? Or what about a Grande Madame in Paris? Things way outside their camp. Imagine it, create it. Don’t record and editorialize on some event that you’ve already lived through. I was always amazed at how effective that was. They were always out of the box when they were given license to imagine something wholly outside their existence. I thought it was a good training for them. Even if they ended up just writing an autobiography, at least they could relate to themselves as strangers."

-Toni Morrison in an 2014 interview with NEA Arts Magazine

quasi-normalcy

I've reached the point where cynicism is a major turn-off for me. You're not smarter than idealists, and you're not helping.

quasi-normalcy

Funny that the stereotypical cynic is an idealist who aged out of it. In my experience, the reverse is true. I was an extreme cynic as a teenager and then I noticed how profoundly limiting it was, and also that "cynics are cool and smart" was a message that was being constantly reinforced by corporate media for some reason.

quasi-normalcy

#yes! cynicism reads as very juvenile to me#and yes prev often stemming from teen pain

Yeah, like I see black-pilled people on here and my default reaction isn't "oh, these must be world-weary old warriors who've lost their faith in humanity", it's "these people are in their 20s and need a hobby"

inbabylontheywept

The Motherfucking Lizard King

No one at work trusts my boss.

He's smart. He works hard. He's not trustworthy. He hasn't actually fucked anyone at work over, but he's ruined his last two marriages with affairs, and got dumped by his third fiance when he wouldn't sign a prenup. The fact that we all know this is just a hazard of working in a small town.

Anyway: The thought process of the people in the lab is that if he screwed over his first wife, and his second wife, and was probably planning on screwing over his third wife, it would be insane for him not to screw us over. After all, what kind of idiot treats their employees better than their spouse?

I dunno. His kind, I guess? He's had a few chances to fuck us over, and he hasn't taken them. Opposite really. When our parent company was doing furloughs, he stayed in the office almost a hundred hours, talking and talking and talking his way up the corporate ladder. And in the end, no one at our site got furloughed.

He's pulled strings like that before. And it baffles me, right? Because it really does make zero sense. He'll move the heavens and the earth for us, but his wife and kids are afterthoughts. It feels like any moment, he's going to look into the mirror and realize how stupid that is. It feels like I'm betting on him making the same stupid mistake again, and again, and again - like it would be less cynical to believe he was, eventually, going to stab me in the back. But he hasn't yet, and as far as I can tell he's been making that mistake for close to fifteen years, and it's already cost him everything it can. If he was going to learn, he would have by now.

So my position on him is that if he wanted to date someone I cared about, I'd warn them off. I don't trust him there. But I tentatively trust him to be my boss. Maybe one day he'll stick the knife in and twist, and everyone will say Ah, Babs, we warned you, but for now, I accept that he's doing a very predictable, very irrational thing, and I've made my peace with it.

---

My job has glue traps.

No one likes the glue traps, but we don't have a lot of options. Poison's banned by state law, spring traps are banned by company safety, and several non-lethal options tried in the past failed to work. The mouse problem can get pretty bad if it's ignored, and there's some real health hazards in that. Our site has never had a positive hantavirus test, thank God, but the big base about a half hour away has. That guy's gonna be on oxygen the rest of his life.

If a mouse gets caught, we just euthanize it. But more than mice get stuck. Lizards can wander into those traps too, and the people working there have different feelings about the lizards. They don't pose nearly the same kind of risk mice do. They're chill little guys, and they keep the moths away, and they're just

You know. They're friendly. There's something to be said about walking into a room, and hitting the light switch, and seeing two little guys on the wall start to do pushups as soon as they see you.

People used to just euthanize the lizards too, but I had pet leopard geckos as a kid and I couldn't take that so I wound up googling how to free animals from glue traps. Now, when a lizard gets stuck in a trap - which happens once or twice a week - I get some vegetable oil from the breakroom, and a little plastic fork, and I'll spend fifteen to twenty minutes just kind of gently prying the little guys out.

I have a team of technicians that help me operate one of the larger machines. They're real blue collar guys, ex-airforce, and they make me look like a little kid. Being an engineer means they'll look to me as a leader sometimes, which is a wild experience. And I started helping the lizards for my own conscience, but one of the crazier consequences of it has been that it seriously boosted my leadership cred. Because those guys see me, and they go: Hey. If he's willing to fight for a lizard, he's gotta be willing to fight for me.

I cannot overstate how nice that is. Most engineers that want to make a change to a maintenance practice, or try an upgrade, they have to work their asses off to get the techs to buy in. But I can just ask. They already trust me to do good. They know I'm new, and they know I'm not the smartest engineer in the building, but they also know I'm the one who gets lizards out of the glue traps.

And just because of that, they're willing to follow me.

---

My boss has a meeting every month or two. It's typically basic house cleaning stuff - reminders about routines we've gotten lazy on, and updates on future projects. Maybe some warnings about problems coming from higher up in the company.

People are, in my opinion, a bit too cynical about the meetings. It stems from people not trusting our boss, which again, I understand, because it would make so much more sense if he wasn't trustworthy. It's a testament to the man's incredibly unhealthy priorities that he is. But as we made it to the end of the meeting, one of bullet points was:

Do NOT mess with animals in the building.

So I looked at my techs, and they looked at me, and when he got to the point, he was so scathing I actually just wanted to crawl under a rock and die. He said basically that he'd heard some reports about someone in the building handling animals that found their way in and got stuck, and that he just wanted to emphasize how insanely inappropriate that was, not to mention dangerous, and that if he needed to speak to anyone about it again, there would be severe consequences.

I was willing to just take the shame and move on. I was. But one of my techs is old. Old enough he could've retired two years ago. And his actual literal goal is to one day get angry, yell at someone, and storm out. That's how he wants to retire. So instead of biting his tongue like everyone else, he stood up and said: I hate the glue traps. You hate the glue traps. We all hate glue traps. But we've all sat here for years, ignoring the little things that get stuck in them, watching them die, and then Bab's comes in, and he is the first person in decades to give enough of a shit to start pulling the lizards out. And I don't want him to stop.

Get humane traps or shut up but we are not going back to the old way of just letting things starve.

And my boss actually froze up. He got all wide eyed and stared at Marc, and then the other techs jumped in, and there was a very small but intense rebellion in the meeting and my boss kept trying to interrupt while getting absolutely bowled over by this gang of angry middle aged air force vets, and eventually he just went

I will speak with Babylon about this afterwards! After! And then he will speak with everyone else, but I have more points to cover.

So they went silent, and my boss rushed through the last five minutes, and we all adjounred. The techs really didn't like that I was going in alone - they thought our boss was going to try and shout me into compliance. Marc in particular was like, Look, if he tries bullying you, stand your ground, and if he threatens anything, just come get us, and we'll give him hell.

So armed with that, I went to my boss's office. I sat in the chair across from him, and he kept his composure for maybe five seconds before just flopping back into his chair.

I had no idea you were saving lizards, he said, but I'm glad you are. I always hated seeing them die in the glue.

I wasn't expecting that. I was about to ask him what the comment from the meeting was about then, but he answered that before I even got the chance.

A snake got into the building last week, and - someone picked it up and chased a coworker around. Turns out that coworker was severely afraid of snakes, and now it's a shitshow. We're a small site, and now I can't ask those two to work together anymore, to say nothing about how the snake fared after all that. Being upset about that is a reasonable thing, right?

And he gave me a look like he actually wanted an answer, so I said Yeah, totally, chasing a coworker around with a snake is a dick move. Especially if that coworker is already afraid of snakes.

And he said Exactly! and then we sat there a few moments longer. He looked so incredibly tired that I did, actually, feel kind of bad for him. And then he somehow managed to sink even further into his chair, and said

Look, I know I'm not a good guy. But I'm not evil. I'm not some sort of crazy asshole that's going to demand that everyone watch lizards starve to death. When you go back downstairs, could you try to pass that on? That I'm not evil?

I said Sure because it wasn't a hard request, and he looked relieved. I actually made it halfway out before I realized I had a question.

Who grabbed the snake? I asked.

Not supposed to talk about it, he said. But whoever comes to mind first is probably right.

ThatGuy? I asked. And he looked me in the face, nodded his head yes, and said No.

---

The techs seemed a little disappointed that they didn't get to storm the boss's office, but were otherwise in good spirits. They were actually a little bit embarrassed to hear about the snake story - apparently, it wasn't much of a secret. It'd just slipped their minds because it happened three weeks ago.

We did maintenance after that, the same basic repairs we did every week. The meeting had been stressful and it was a relief to work with my hands. When the parts were reinstalled, everything cleaned and smooth and ready to go, Marc found me again.

You know what the lesson of today is? he asked. And there were quite a few answers to that that I could have taken - from don't assume the worst of people to be careful with how you spend your trust - we all need it more than we think.

But instead I said what? because I wanted to hear what his answer was going to be.

That I got your back, he said. Then he clapped one very, very large hand on my shoulder, gave it a good squeeze, and walked back to dosimetry lab.

---

The next day, Marc gave me a package and told me to open it in my office. I was suspicious, but I followed the request.

Cardboard gave way to a small baggie, obviously full of fabric, which opened to reveal a t-shirt that read

"I Am the Motherfucking Lizard King."

I looked at it, I loved it, and then I got an idea. I went to my boss's office and knocked on the door. When he opened it, I asked him if he would be willing to allow something very unprofessional to happen for morale building purposes.

How unprofessional? he asked. I held the shirt up in answer. He gave the shirt a short look over and snorted.

You can wear it on weeks without customers, he said. Which just so happened to include that week.

I'll pass on that it came with your blessing, I replied, and he looked oddly relieved.

Thanks, he said. And then I went downstairs.

---

The techs were very, very happy to see the shirt. And while my boss's reputation remains in tatters, and probably will be until he moves (or dies), the next time there was a meeting, there was quite a bit less complaining about how mere presence. Which is, I guess, a start.

We'll see if he squanders it.