Do not attempt to out-malicious-compliance the staff at the malicious compliance conference.

Some dipshit decided to pay the conference fee ($250) in quarters. He handed us a wrapped plastic bag full of loose change. "It's all there," he said with a shit-eating grin, "you can count it."

Oh buddy. We're going to count it. What were you expecting?

At about the time I got to $60, he offered to give us $300 collateral so he could get his badge and go to the conference.

No, bud. You get to watch the most dyscalculic staffer count to a thousand while all your friends go in to the breakfast and find seats for the first talk.

"Ruining someone's day" is the favorite hobby of everyone here. Why would you hand us the perfect opportunity to wreck your shit and think that was an own? Half the con is calling him "Untraceable," the other half is calling him "Quarter Boy" and nobody cares what he says his handle is.

I spent an hour counting that and made him go fetch me baggies to hold it every fifty dollars.

This ended up being a good bonus prank for me too, because when the counting was done I wrapped the bags in gaffer's tape and spent the rest of the day handing it to people very casually while saying "oh here, hold this for a sec" and then watching they weren't ready for the weight (I only did this to people I know well enough to know this wouldn't hurt them).

It's an infosec conference, so it's a weekend in a hotel full of people whose favorite thing is breaking the law and whose second favorite thing is following the letter of the law while cheerfully violating the spirit.

the idea that restrooms, locker rooms, etc need to be single-sex spaces in order for women to be safe is patriarchy's way of signalling to men & boys that society doesn't expect them to behave themselves around women. it is directly antifeminist. it would be antifeminist even if trans people did not exist. a feminist society would demand that women should be safe in all spaces even when there are men there.

btw this is maybe the single most key distinguishing feature of the terfy strains of radical feminism, the seed all the rest of it springs out of: they have absolutely no faith in the ability of feminism to actually destroy patriarchy. they do not think feminism can truly build a better world. they cannot really even imagine that possibility. they think patriarchy is an inevitable natural consequence of unchangeable biological facts, and therefore the goal of feminism can only be to mitigate the worst effects of patriarchy, not to get rid of it.

they can imagine a society where women get some designated safe spaces without men around. they cannot imagine a society where the presence of men is not inherently a danger to women.

Whispering secret data.

COLORING + SHARPENING TUTORIAL

someone asked for a coloring tutorial and my sharpening settings, so here it is! there are also a few tips to achieve more HQ gifs. :)

tutorial under the cut!

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

an article on the subject for the curious:

the smash or pass blog isn't active any more so i have to take matters into my own hands

reblogs help sample size

hey sorry i don't care if you do or don't want to fuck the brand object but

why is kojima there

he fucked schick hydrobot

SEVERANCE HIVE WE BACK UP

this guy gets it

advice i think we should tell children is that when adults say stuff like ‘now that i’m an adult i get really excited about stuff like coffee tables and bathrooms and rugs etc’ they don’t mean ‘and now i don’t care about blorbo and squimbus from my childhood tv shows anymore’ bc your average adult still loves all the same pop culture stuff they always did; they just have a greater appreciation for the mundane as well. growing up just means you can enjoy life twice as much now. you can get really excited about a new stuffed animal AND about a new kitchen sponge. peace and love

You get bigger so you can store even MORE love and appreciation for the world inside of you

It means you'll be at the antique mall looking at a coffee table and thinking "blorbo and Squimbus would LOVE this coffee table"

These curtains remind me of Blorbo! And that rug is a perfect match for Squimbus's color scheme!

hey. why can i enable subliminal weight loss mantras in bejeweled 3

Bejeweled hypno kink

I wonder how hard it would be to mod in new ones

subliminal mantra of giving me fat tiddies

Sublingual estrogen of giving you fat tiddies

It's easy enough to mod in that it's on the mind control games wiki!

It's VERY easy @foone

To make custom files for Bejeweled-- All you have to do is just paste a text file with a bunch of words into the appropriate folder--

Sleepyhead is the admin of Mindcontrol.fun and she and I trade txt files for this purpose ALL OF THE TIME.

Literally it takes less than 30 seconds.

Go to your Bejeweled Folder and select affirmations

Open or create a txt document

Type whatever you want, each new line is a new message that will play out on the screen

AND THAT'S IT. You have created a Bejeweled Hypnosis File!

Awesome. Thank you for your service

What is a minor detail in one of your favorite shows that drives you absolutely bonkers???

I'll start:

This is from the second title sequence for Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was used in Seasons 3-7. (Season 5 had a spicy title card that is another thing to discuss altogether.)

As you can see, the starfield behind the ringed planet is one way as the camera moves in and the rings fill the entire left side of the screen. Then, as we pan away from the planet, a completely different starfield is there!

Technically, this is probably because the shots of the Enterprise were re-used from the original title sequence used in Seasons 1 and 2, and it was just easier to do a hidden wipe from the new footage to the old, rather than re-compositing the Enterprise elements over a new starfield. Even so, this detail was visible to me as a kid on off-the-air VHS recordings, played on a CRT TV, so it isn't just something that becomes apparent in the Blu-Ray or anything. (Honestly, though, I'm actually really glad they preserved this for the Blu-Ray. It would have likely been easy-ish for them to "fix" this, given their remastering process, so even if it drives me bonkers I'm grateful that they preserved this artifact of the show!)

Anyway, I love Star Trek, and watching these shows as a teenager, noticing all of these details, is a lot of why I went to film school and why I love making my own little movies and things to this day—even if I don't do it quite to the extent that I'd maybe like.

when I was a kid I thought that was Saturn and all I could think about what wtf happened to Saturn between now and the 24th century??

as someone who has hacked a ton of games: yes this is how they are.

Games that have shipped are full of terrible hacks. often they're marked as such! if you've got comments, you'll often see shit like "// fix this before we ship" and the game shipped 20 years ago, and the hack is still there.

It's gotten slightly better since the 90s? We used to have to hack around basic missing pieces of the game engine. Like, Duke Nukem 3D has a lie in the first screen you see:

You see the little shadow around that roof bit in the middle?

This engine doesn't support world shadows. There's engine support for shadows under enemies, yes, but not on the world. Duke3D came out in January 1996, and Quake was high anticipated and only a few months away, and guess what? it supported world shadows! It had a whole lighting engine!

See? World shadows! The torch on the way leaves a shadow under it, and that column casts a shadow, and Duke Nukem 3D's BUILD engine supports zero of that. So... why is there a shadow there?

If you open the level in the editor, you'll find that the shadow is defined as a sector. You see, the engine DOES allow you to manually set the brightness level for floors/ceilings.

So they just made the level designers manually put shadows in. For every bit of the world that should have a shadow, manually draw a sector the shape of the shadow, then darken it a few shades. There you go, shadows. Did this take a massive amount of work? Probably! but it meant they looked like they had a feature they didn't.

Railroad Tycoon saves games by taking a screenshot of the map. Commander Keen scrolls the screen by redrawing the edges of items and then actually redrawing it every 8 pixels. Wolfenstein 3D figures out when two columns of the screen next to each other have the same colors and draws them at the same time, because it was faster on these ancient video cards. 3D Movie Maker has "full 3D backgrounds" that are actually just a flat picture, but they appear 3D because they also do some trickery with a depth-buffer. Half-Life has a tram with a door that can open, something the Gold-Src engine can't do, by having two copies of the tram level (one with a door and one with a tram) and having a loading point after the tram stops moving.

Games are always hacks at some level. They always have been! They probably always will be.

We only know about these hacks because they're in games that shipped. The beautiful hack-free games that are architecturally pure in their design? They probably never got finished.

So yeah. Don't be afraid to fake what you can't do in your creative endeavors. Chances are, no one will ever notice, and the few weirdos who do (like me) will think you're a genius for doing it.