Nine privacy policies

1. We promise never to contact you at all under any circumstances, other than maybe if we as a company have been drinking and it is late at night and we start to dwell on lost marketing opportunities and the great sales of the past that our current merchandising never seems to live up to. It is possible that we may text you then to limply say ‘what’s up?’; an action that we will miserably dwell on the next morning as we try to charm our corporate hangover away with bad coffee.

2. Information is very important to us. Did you know that crickets have ears on their knees? That’s your information now, we’ve bequeathed it to you. Look after it carefully.

3. Well, you have been careless with your data, haven’t you? Now, we as a company care very deeply about the security of your data. Dare we say the sanctity of your data. That is why we realise the only way to keep your data safe is to take it away from you. We’ll be starting with the usual: mother’s maiden name, first pet and so on. Remember them? I didn’t think so.

4. Our privacy policy is that, once you have signed up to the service, we will follow you around forever in the form of a grey ghostly figure with great staring eyes and a sombre froglike mouth, watching your every move and silently judging them against a moral system that will always remain a mystery to you. We apply this policy without discrimination to all users and, as a supernatural service, I’m sure you will agree that it is outside the remit of earthly law.

5. Let’s put it this way: we recognise the importance to our business plan of us continuing to send you letters which, although you say you do not want, you will nevertheless dutifully scroll through to see if there is something important at the end and maybe idly click on a link if there is something you are supposed to be doing next that you would rather put off.

6. Our privacy policy is that we will turn on the tap or hum or something while you are in the toilet because we know sound carries in here, if you could do the same for us that would be much appreciated, you wouldn’t think a company would need to use the toilet but it’s one of the great drawbacks of corporate personhood, don’t ask.

7. Continuing to use this kitchen means that you agree to have cookies placed on your device. If your device cannot eat cookies why did you bring it in here. This is a cookie kitchen. We do not serve robots.

8. I’m sure you’ll appreciate we can’t release our privacy policy to just anyone. Come to the Jolly Woodpecker at 11 and ask at the back bar for Dave. The woman who trips over your foot will have left a note in your pocket. If you agree then mumble a confused apology at her for leaving your foot in the way. If not then we’re afraid under data protection legislation we will not be able to send you on any more missions.

9. I’m afraid we have no idea who you are. Would you like one of these round things? They’re quite tasty.

Don’t just accept the new Terms of Service

Tumblr’s at it again, thanks to the new European Privacy Laws. There’s probably nobody who will read this, but it pissed me off so much that I decided to make a post about it. (Ignore the weird language mish-mash, depending on your country the language might differ.)

OK, so many of us get this screen when we try to access our dash:

Realise how the ‘OK’ button is a nice, attention-grabbing blue? If you’re like me, you’re not exactly into reading a 100 pages document and tend to just click it.

My tip? DONT. Instead click on ‘Manage Options’ right next to it:

Now you’ll see this page:

Still pretty harmless, right? That ‘Accept’ button is looking really attractive right now. Instead, click on Verwalten (Probably something like ‘Manage Options’ or something in english) and you’ll get to this page:

Now that’s not too bad, right? I just switched all the buttons to ‘off’, because I’m jealously guarding my personal information and don’t want Tumblr to go off and do who knows what with it. Looks like we’re done! But wait: There’s a SHOW option.

When we click on that one, what we will get is this:

A HUGE list with OVER 300 ENTRIES of companies that can use your data by default if you’d just clicked ‘OK’ on that very first page. Coincidence that this list is hidden that much? Me thinks not. They’re all switched on by default, but I am still a petty bitch that doesn’t want to give out her data, so I switched them all off. All 300+ of them. There is no option to switch them all off at once, and even if you disable all the options above, the companies are still switched on.

(If you wonder how i got that number, I copied the list into excel and looked at the cell number. No way am I actually counting all those entries)

I too, am a petty bitch who unticked every single one.

wooooooowwww thank you Europe

!!!!!!!!!If you already clicked “OK”, go to your Settings > Privacy > disable the cookie consent and re-enable it, it’ll take you to the beginning of this  !!!!!

Good ole EU.  But yeah, unselecting them all, one by one, was a pain.

If tumblr thought I wasn’t going to tick them off one by one, they were sorely mistaken, ahahaha.

It’s annoying but takes about five minutes.

i had to do it twice. I checked through the Oath thing, and they were ALL on again. Be careful.

Lmfao the entire point of GDPR is that private persons should have very easy control on who can use their data.. and tumblr is doing its best to make it extra hard. Ticked everything off, but this is such a fuck up.

I feel like I should have been able to do some clever html/javascript trick to unselect all of these, but in the end that would have taken longer than just clicking them all by hand. This is explicitly against the spirit and word of the GDPR and now I can’t even remember what I wanted to look up on this hellsite. Oh well.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault holds over 850,000 types of seeds, situated in permafrost at a constant 3-4 degrees Celsius below zero. The seeds are preserved and ready to be planted in case of a doomsday event or nuclear war that wipes out the world’s food supply.

Coven of the Inarticulate Podcast Episode 1   - Interview with some people who really like vampires

Come along and meet the POTP (people of the podcast GET IT??? GET IT???). In this episode we talk about the Vampire Chronicles and why we like them enough to set up a cross continental podcast about them.

Coven of the Inarticulate is an international podcast about Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles hosted by @claudiasashes, @theballadofmrslovett, @monstersinthecosmos and @theraphaellus. We hope you’ll give it a listen!

(Ps. this is our first time doing podcasting yall, please bear with the sound quality, we figure it out in ep 3.)

I’m not currently on Tumblr but I *am* super into podcasts (because they are good for at the gym and the tail end of migraines) so this is amazing news! :D

As winter begins to unfold across the land, please remember the local vampires. Invite them into your home. Remember: if you are cold, so are they.

Jack London (via literatureismyutopia)

So, when I have nervous breakdowns, I stay indoors for days and do projects. This is my most recent thing. I borrowed a copy of Folland’s Real Analysis from my guy. It’s over 100 bucks to purchase from Wiley & Sons, and the binding is SO BAD that all the pages start falling out immediately. Also, it’s free as a PDF. But, anyway, this one was already purchased, and my guy gave me permission to do this to it:

And this:

And a little bit of this and this:

So that it would be like this now:

I’m waiting for the corner protectors to come in to cover up some not-quite-excellent corner work, but all in all I’m very happy about this new hobby. Rebinding books is a seriously valuable skill for a person in academia. I’m about to make some printed, older-edition-of-textbooks-that-are-out-of-copyright PDFs look SO GOOD, heck yes.  

Oops I did the thing again to My New Favorite Book

(Image descriptions: a series of photos showing the progress of rebinding a textbook in very fancy-looking hardback, with red-shading-into-black alligator-skin-looking covers. The last picture shows a different textbook bound, also very fancily, in embossed brown leather.)

@zarkonnen, look! It’s your maths textbooks as grimoires idea in real life!

Michael Warner, “Tongues Untied” in Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (216)

oh dude. this is peak content

Early Irish law is very important.

You gotta love that the Brehons were even thinking of the crazy cat ladies. 

question, and feel free to answer with real info or total bullshit (i like both): why was this an issue of concern for lawmakers? like, were there disputes over cat names? what problem was this seeking to solve?

I’m going off memory and this is going to sound like BS, but it’s not, I went to school for this, lol. Cat’s were an important part of keeping a house in the medieval era. Rats, mice and roaches were known to be disease carriers and keeping a good hunting cat was believed to be a good ward against those animals and their diseases. (Of course, with the exception of plague, this is true.) But not all cats are created equal, same as now, some were content to just sit around and mooch off the milk. (Don’t feed your cat cows milk, we know better now.) Medieval Irish cat law, or  “ Catshlechta “ Was a means of solving the lazy cat problem. How do you determine what a cat is worth? By it’s merit of course. How do you know what it’s merits are? By it’s name. So a good hunting cat would be given a name that reflected what its positive traits were regarding it’s job. (Everything was work back then, even for cats.) In example… “Meone” meant “Mighty roar” and it was considered to be able to scare beasts away (both pests and supernatural creatures.) It was worth 2 cows. “Cruipne” or “Mighty paw” was a thrice proven mouser, and worth three ounces of coinage. usually assigned to protect areas of wealth like grain stores or cattle housings. “Breone” or “Fireside cat” was good at both hunting and purring (I.E affection.) and was worth 3 whole cows. “Baircne” a female cat (Owned by a woman usually) said to be good at protecting ships and women. It was worth whatever you could get a woman’s husband would pay for it. Cats were usually kept in the same housing as the cows and were looked after by whomever fed said cows, hence the relation to cow costs. Also, gender mattered. Male cats were noted to be far more lazy, and were worth about half of whatever a female cat was.  (Don’t ask me how they sexed the cats, they didn’t leave us that detail.) There’s also a set of laws for dogs called “Conshlechta” . 

Okay how are those names pronounced though

And what would a lazy, dumb cat be called because I might need to change my cat’s nickname

With the usual caveat that we don’t actually know how medieval languages were pronounced, and that this is a reconstructed pronunciation based on historical linguistics:

Meone: /’meo:ne/ meh-OH-neh, with stress on the meh.

Cruipne /’crubne/ CRUB-neh.

Breone /’breo:ne/ breh-OH-neh, stress on breh.

Baircne /’bar’gne/ BAR-ug-neh, with the ‘ug’ syllable much shorter than the other two syllables.

@obaewankenope @deadcatwithaflamethrower for language reasons

(Image description: screenshot of a tweet by @PeritiaEditors, including a picture of a cat from an illuminated mediaeval manuscript. “Early Irish law suggested cat names such as Meoinne (meow cf dil.ie/31980). [TCD Book of Kells detail] #InternationalCatDay”)

Beautiful Bengal Cat Suki Adds Magic With Her Dazzling Sea Blue Eyes Against Nature

Keep reading

(Image description: several photos of a bengal cat in natural settings (mountains, fields of wildflowers, rivers). In several, the cat is accompanied by a person with long red hair. The dominant colours of the photos are orange and turquoise, the same as the cat’s fur and eyes.)

35 - Lindell / Ceres

Lindell is a spirit - a water nymph, to be exact - who inhabits the Lindell River, a small and polluted river that trundles sluggishly around between the factories.  Greasy out-flows and vats of mechanical effluent are dumped into his home daily, and have since the factories first came in the early 19th century.  He wouldn’ve have it any other way.  Like any nature spirit, his nature is inextricably tied to the landscape in which he has his roots: the river is disgusting, industrial, oily and happy to help, and so is he.

Ceres is the old goddess of grain - not quite the harvest: she is in the grain itself, and its manifold byproducts.  It used to be that she was revered during the harvest and the making of bread, but now wheat and other grains are processed on an industrial scale, and therefore, so is she.  She is every identical cheery loaf of bread, wafting past on their way to be bagged, and she is free in every box of breakfast cereal.  The oldest and most trivial of gods never die; they just change shape slightly.

Percy Bysshe Shelley on the lifestyle of Lord Byron (via timemarauder)

Man Tracks Down People He Photographed in the Street 40 Years Ago to Recreate Their Pictures