Violently Pastel @violentlypastel - Tumblr Blog

Posts

gmailconstruct

primordial soup

sevserez

Soup incident

pocketss

distressing things to say to your friends

monstrous-ideas

Its been five years of it’s august and the flow of time still haunts me

dubiousculturalartifact

The new Odyssey adaptation has inevitably gotten people talking about a Muppet version of it, and they’re frequently suggesting Kermit as Odysseus, Miss Piggy as Penelope.

I’m sorry but that’s thinking way too small, hear me out:

We need to have Miss Piggy as Odysseus, and Kermit as Penelope.

Think about it… who’s the more fickle, prideful, warlike one in that relationship? Who is absolutely ready to go ham, at a moment’s notice?

It ain’t Kermit

anyroads

Miss Piggy tied to the mast while Statler and Waldorf heckle her from the sea

mindovermuses

But who is the single human cast member in this tale? Who gets to put in an Oscar-worthy performance alongside the Muppets and what role are they to play?

muffinflarp69

There’s no single human, everyone is a Muppet except for one scene. Circe, played by Janice, turns Odysseus’s crew into humans who still behave animalistic and are all played by Academy Award winning actors.

nohoperadio

just saw a pigeon doing the puffed up courtship dance thing to another pigeon, and as he was strutting around he suddenly stopped for a split second to do a very brief preen-peck at his own side, then returned to the strutting around. and i surprised myself by instantly losing respect for the male pigeon in that moment, like come on man i appreciate you had an itch or whatever but how is she supposed to feel special when you're getting distracted by bullshit like that? which on reflection i don't endorse, i mean those are pretty harsh dating norms i'm imposing on these pigeons, from a total outsider perspective, for no reason. probably not all girl pigeons are as uptight about that sort of thing as i would apparently be if i was a girl pigeon, maybe she even found it endearing who knows, i don't know her. it's none of my business really. sorry pigeons.

misscromwellsmonocle

The Little Art Connoisseur (1863) August Friedrich Siegert

darnitjack

Last time this came around I showed my three year old and he said "He's little like me!" and stared for a whole minute (v. Long in toddler time).

derinthescarletpescatarian

Your toddler was the Little Art Connoiseur

go-learn-esperanto

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!

saturniandragon

Tumblr people!! I've figured out a way to delete GDID from your computer!

Removing and Blocking Global Device Identifier (GDID) – A Guide for Better Privacy in Microsoft Windows 10/11 Written by saturniandragon@tum

I also made a PDF version!!

Please do me a favor, reblog for reach!! This went through several days of research and testing!! THANKS

ryanthedemiguy

You can get and use windows 11 (and every prior windows iteration) without logging in with a microsoft account, as of five days ago. I am a local user on my computer. Don't ask me how to do it, because my computer repair guy did it when he reinstalled windows, but there are tutorials out there. Refuse to connect to internet until you're set up and can use the computer freely.

syn4k

i will give tiktok one concession and that is that it has spawned a comment that contains a phrase that i think of often at relevant moments: pack it up boys we've made a social blunder

syn4k

(from a video featuring someone's father/grandfather)

dragon-in-a-fez

is anyone else reading "pack it up boys we've made a social blunder" in the voice of the lead penguin guy from Madagascar

jthm-moved

hobo-rg

“spicy pillow” jokes aside, I think @flowerkrone’s tags deserve a serious reply:

#my old phone looks like this on my shelf lmao #im too scared to touch it to throw it away #idk what trash this even goes into when its at this point

The pillow-shaped object here used to be the phone’s battery. It’s not a battery anymore. Now it’s a balloon full of corrosive, pyrophoric chemicals and hydrogen gas and it’s one puncture away from burning your house down. I am 100% serious. You should be scared to touch it.

But you gotta touch it, because you gotta get it out of your house before the pressure builds up to the point where the balloon pops. This isn’t going to happen soon – there is no need to panic – but it will happen eventually.

And, indeed, it doesn’t go in the ordinary trash. You put this in the ordinary trash and you’re gonna set the garbage truck on fire. Don’t do that to the garbage collectors, their job is hard enough already.

The first thing you need to do is get a fireproof container. The most common household item that qualifies as a fireproof container is a cast-iron cookpot with a cast-iron lid – often sold as a “Dutch oven.” Any other cooking container that’s unreactive, has a very high melting point, and has a lid made of the same materials will also work: enameled or stainless steel, Pyrex with glass lid, etc.

However: Do not use a pot with a PTFE-based non-stick coating. If the battery does explode, the fire will probably be hot enough to degrade a PTFE coating, producing toxic smoke. (Not that you should breathe the smoke from the battery fire either, but PTFE breakdown products are worse.) Do not use a pot made of aluminium or copper. The fire might even get hot enough to melt those.

Whatever container you use, you might have to throw away along with the phone, so don’t use your good Dutch oven for this. Go to a thrift store and buy a cheap one.

Once you have the fireproof container:

Gently pick up the phone and put it in the fireproof container. If possible, gently tape the phone to the bottom of the container to prevent it from bouncing around. Don’t put any padding in there, that’ll just make a fire worse if it does happen. Put the lid on and tape it shut.

Put a label on the container, something like “DEFECTIVE LI-ION BATTERY – FIRE HAZARD”.

It is now reasonably safe to move the container around. However, if the battery does explode, the container is very likely to leak smoke and get hot, so keep it in a well-ventilated area and away from things that will be damaged by heat. Don’t leave it exposed to the weather, either.

You need to find either a hazardous waste disposal site, or an e-waste recycler that will accept defective Li-ion batteries. I can’t help with that because I have no idea where you live.

However, your local fire department, if you have one, will probably be happy to help. Call their non-emergency number. Nothing is on fire yet, so this isn’t an emergency, but things that can easily start a fire are still within the fire department’s responsibilities. Tell them you have a phone with a bulging lithium-ion battery, you put it in a fireproof container, and you want to know how to dispose of it safely.

If the fire department tries to tell you this isn’t dangerous or it’s okay to throw it out in the regular trash (with or without fireproof container), hang up on them and write a cranky letter to your local government representatives, then keep looking for a proper disposal site.

When you do find a a hazardous waste disposal site or an e-waste recycler, call them and make sure they will take defective Li-ion batteries, before showing up. That’s also a good time to ask if they will let you have the fireproof container back.

lolbatty

Reblog to save lives.

bisexualbaker

[Image: A phone with the insides visible, including a battery that has inflated like a balloon. The photo is captioned, “Pillow :33”]

flock-of-cassowaries

Reblogging because I would have had absolutely no idea what to do, either.

carriesthewind

This the report that JK Rowing doesn't want you to see. This report scares her so much that she is trying to destroy Amnesty International, a human rights organization, to stop you reading it:

Amnesty International put out a major report documenting the influence of UK based anti trans gender critical organizations and their fundin

(Amnesty already pulled the report because of JKR's threats. Of course that didn't and won't stop her - capitulating to fascists and bigots is never the answer. Alejandra captured the report and posted it, so you can read what JKR doesn't want you to know.)

holy-leapin-splits-batman

quasi-normalcy

I'm going to be honest, I think that cyberpunk was probably pretty innovative when it started off in the 1980s but now it (and it's various "punk" spinoffs) just kind of linger over the science fiction genre like a miasma and it's time for someone to come up with something new.

dailyadventureprompts

Like a lot of breakaway scifi subgenres, cyberpunk asked questions about heavy social and political topics by taking the emerging technology of the day and dialing it up to 11, projecting a dystopian future where all of the (then) contemporary concerns had reached some impossible nightmare zenith:

Resource shortages driven by mass consumption

Urban decay brought about by austerity and the collapse of the American economy in response to globalization

Ultracomodification and alienation driven by unchecked capitalism

Increased corporate power subverting or even outright replacing governments

Information technology being used to reinforce state power, and subsequently take on it's own power outside of anyone's control.

Plus a million other things the genre grew to include

Problem is, the cyberpunk dystopia happened: We hit the upper limit of what dysfuncitonal economies and broken goverments and capitalist profiteering were able to exploit and it's all down hill from here as the value extraction systems cannibalize each other.

Cyberpunk has gone from being dystopian to being nostalgic, a retro throwback to the days when the cultural assumptions about personal agency in a world full of infinite growth were still somewhat possible. Yeah, the world was shitty, but you could still be an ultracool badass who smashed the system before going down in a blaze of glory.

Flash forward to the day and systems are smashing themselves (plus all of us, and the world in general) to pieces trying to siphon the last little slivers of market percentage into shareholder's pockets.

If you wanted to make a genre that was as topical for right now as cyberpunk was for it's time, I think there's two directions you could go..

Fantasy of Reform: Stories that are based around people's resonances to these massive systems breaking down and how to subvert/repair/overcome them. Society is worth saving, we just need to steward it through the birthpangs of latestage capitalist collapse. Shoutout to Cory Doctorow who's been writing in this protogenre since the bush administration.

Post Dystopian Absurdism: Turn the dial past 11, break it, show us what happens when the titans of industry not only go astray but collapse, decay, are left as nothing more than ozymandious style relics buried in the sand. It's a bitter hope, but showing people surviving and even thriving in a dead era or in its aftermath reassures us that life will go on, no matter the hurdles. I think of the Forever Winter game by fundog as my example for this, making a nightmarish world where the player can be kind, or perhaps even silly if given the chance.

theresattrpgforthat

There's A TTRPG For That!

Some ttrpgs I think might be worth exploring, if you're looking at sci-fi/fantasy genres about rebellion, reform and post-apocalypse:

Detente for the Ravenous, by A.A. Voigt: The Cold War if Henry Kissinger was the Pope. About colonized peoples organizing to bring down the Kaiju-as-metaphor for colonialist and capitalist attempts to consume the world around them, it feels heavily inspired by Heart, Babel, and F.I.S.T..

Rising Tide, by cosmicbeagle: A PARAGON playset about ecojustice pirates striking back against oil companies and other multi-conglomerates by destroying their assets while on the high seas.

Hunting Billionaires for Sport, by hexavexagon: A game where hunting billionaires is a legitimate practice that provides a media company with plenty of profits due to the popularity of live-streaming these hunts. You are some of those hunters, going up against everything those billionaires throw at you.

Apocalypse Roadtrip, by Mynar Lenahan: In a world overtaken by aliens, cryptids, kaiju, and secret government entities, your home has quickly fallen apart. Travel from place to place keeping each-other alive using whatever technology you can get your hands on.

Red Markets, by Hebanon Games: The zombie apocalypse happened and we just kind of... kept going. Try to make a living while on the wrong side of the economy by recovering proof that certain people died, so that your employers can claim the contents of their wills.

Sea Legs, by Jack Blair: The rich have left our climate apocalypse behind. We are left with a world where most cities have sunk beneath a rising ocean. You are a crew scavenging in order to keep your community alive, and sometimes fighting with others to get precious resources.

Many of the entries of Applied Hope: The Solarpunk & Utopias jam might also be up your alley, including Sunstained, by Mythworks, Green Skies, by SmallRedRobin13, and How to Ooze Charm into the Future, by Paul Czege.

fuckyeahchinesefashion

OP: Why couldn’t traditional Chinese Yinpiao银票/silver drafts be forged if they were merely slips of paper? (cr大明宝钞，渐越)

Traditional Chinese yinpiao/silver drafts were paper vouchers issued by private banks starting from the Song Dynasty(960–1279). People could exchange these slips for physical silver at bank branches across the country.

Silver drafts were made in multiple copies with matching serrated seal edges. One copy went to the customer and others stayed at the bank. All edges had to fit perfectly together to withdraw silver. The unique split edge marks were almost impossible to copy.

This mechanism is known as qifeng骑缝 (split-joint seal) in China. It first originated in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). The Rites of Zhou records that contracts were written on bamboo or wooden slips in duplicate. Notches and marks were carved in the middle before splitting the slips, with each party keeping one half. The two halves would be matched by their notches for verification.

During the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770–221 BC), this idea evolved into hufu虎符/tiger tally tokens. A military tally was split into two pieces with identical inscriptions carved along the split edge. Troops could only be deployed if the patterns and characters on both halves perfectly aligned, serving as a metal version of the split-joint anti-counterfeiting system.

The technology matured in the Tang Dynasty (618–907). Government documents and private contracts commonly used split-joint seals stamped across the dividing line. The Chinese character "hetong合同" (contract) was written across the middle before the paper was torn apart, so the complete characters would only appear when the two halves were put together. This split-coupon system was later adopted for Song Dynasty (960–1279) jiaozi paper money and yinpiao/silver drafts of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1912).

Official Song dynasty paper money (Jiaozi交子) was abolished in 1107. Private silver drafts issued by Qing-era piaohao票行 (ancient exchange banks) vanished completely in 1951, hit hard by modern banks and currency reforms. Nowadays silver drafts no longer circulate as currency. Their collectible value depends on their rarity and physical condition.

Split-joint seals (骑缝章qifengzhang)are still widely used on important paper documents in modern China, an anti-tampering technique passed down from ancient times. They are applied across the edge of multi-page contracts, bidding documents and official archives. If any page is removed or replaced, the broken seal pattern can prove the file has been altered.

ariaste

OMG I got so excited about this because they used a really similar (though far less refined) version of this for contracts in the European medieval period!

First they were called "chirographs", but later the word "indenture" (in its earliest meaning as just a legal document of any kind between two people) came to be used, originating from the practice of a contract being written twice on a single piece of parchment and then cut in half with serrated edges (as in dent, "teeth" -> indents -> indenture) in order for each party to take one half, so they could later piece them together and verify that there had been no forgery -- same as the Chinese silver drafts!

(Charter of the Clerecía de Ledesma, 1252, showing the serrated indents at the top -- presumably they are cutting rather than tearing because they're using parchment, which I expect is much harder to tear than wood-pulp paper like the Chinese were using)

Delights me when human beings find similar ways to solve the same problem at two different ends of the world. <3

rjzimmerman

Not long after the Great American Experiment began, the newly established nation set its sights west. Here's how a series of conflicts, forg

Excerpt from this story from National Geographic:

1775-1819 In 1775, most of the United States was still Indigenous land; however, even George Washington acknowledged that it would require a “great wall” to restrain European settlers from encroaching on Indigenous territory. Over 200 years of land transfers (in which lands previously inhabited by Indigenous people became official property of non-Indigenous people), the Indigenous population was gradually confined to small areas within the U.S.

1820-1864 By 1820, settlers had moved well into the Midwest, displacing Indigenous inhabitants through conflict or the simple pressure of their presence. By 1834, the frontier reached as far as Kansas. In one astonishing 14-year period, starting in 1850 and motivated by mid-century gold finds, nearly the entire west coast of the United States transferred from Indigenous to U.S. hands. The only state still almost entirely unscathed was New Mexico.

1865-1894 At the end of the Civil War, 20,000 soldiers were manning western forts. Between 1865 and 1879, vast areas of land were seized, including the rest of Kansas and most of Texas, North Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, and Nevada. The Department of War struggled against the Apache and Navajo in New Mexico. Cessations and treaties continued to chip away at Indigenous lands, with the exception of Oklahoma, though the 1887 Dawes Act would soon change that.

1895-2026 From 1895 to 1988, Indigenous people lost another two-thirds of their lands to non-Indigenous people. The largest of these losses was in Oklahoma, previously known as Indian Territory. A major catalyst was the Dawes Act (aka the General Allotment Act), eventually rescinded in 1934, which broke up commonly held land and parceled out plots to Indigenous individuals—destroying collective social structures—who were often later obliged to sell.