I'm built different. like incorrectly i think

so in third grade I told two of my friends I could talk to horses & made up a really dramatic backstory of how I “discovered” my powers & our teacher overheard us talking about it and told the child psychologist I was seeing for insomnia issues & the child psychologist asked me about it & I was first and foremost terrified that if I admitted to the lie, this medical professional would tell my friends I made it all up

so I doubled down and insisted I could really talk to horses. I was doing major damage control. I didn’t realize you can’t just tell psychiatric professionals you have magic powers, I was 8.

so I ended up in counseling for this for an entire year until eventually I just stopped going for some reason but when I was 20 the office contacted me to tell me the psychologist was retiring & asked if I wanted a copy of my childhood records before they were filed away and eventually shredded & I said sure & went over them & discovered that she had diagnosed me with “psychotic delusions” bc I was 8 and apparently convinced her I truly thought I could talk to horses.

genuinely cannot tell if I my parents should’ve been cashing in on me as the most sought-after child actor of the era or if that psychologist was just extremely so so so bad at her job.

I also figured out I stopped seeing her because she told my parents the diagnosis and my dad was like “she’s doesn’t think she can talk to horses!!! she’s lying to you 😭😭😭😭” but she didn’t believe him

i say i was a weird-horse-girl in elementary school and you say “me too” but did it get you a psychiatric diagnosis

reading your own fic is really like "wow this is awesome why is it not finished" and then you start sobbing

Not all venom fans are monster fuckers 😞 some of us are just aroace disasters who like the idea of a platonic soulmate who likes to murder annoying people for you, is that so bad?

Guys I’m part of the club 🥺

monsterqueerplatonic

We got you, OP.

#sex is weird as fuck might as well add tentacles

They should invent a career path that isn't soooooooo scary

they should invent a culture that isn't soooooooo career-oriented

one of the best academic paper titles

for those who don't speak academia: "according to our MRI machine, dead fish can recognise human emotions. this suggests we probably should look at the results of our MRI machine a bit more carefully"

I hope everyone realises how incredibly important this dead fish study is. This was SO fucking important.

I still don’t understand

So basically, in the psych and social science fields, researchers would (I don't know if they still do this, I've been out of science for awhile) sling around MRIs like microbiolosts sling around metagenomic analyses. MRIs can measure a lot but people would use them to measure 'activity' in the brain which is like... it's basically the machine doing a fuckload of statistics on brain images of your blood vessels while you do or think about stuff. So you throw a dude in the machine and take a scan, then give him a piece of chocolate cake and throw him back in and the pleasure centres light up. Bam! Eating chocolate makes you happy, proven with MRI! Simple!

These tests get used for all kinds of stuff, and they get used by a lot of people who don't actually know what they're doing, how to interpret the data, or whether there's any real link between what they're measuring and what they're claiming. It's why you see shit going around like "men think of women as objects because when they look at a woman, the same part of their brain is active as when they look at a tool!" and "if you play Mozart for your baby for twenty minutes then their imagination improves, we imaged the brain to prove it!" and "we found where God is in the brain! Christians have more brain activity in this region than atheists!"

There are numerous problems with this kind of science, but the most pressing issue is the validity of the scans themselves. As I said, there's a fair bit of stats to turn an MRI image into 'brain activity', and then you do even more stats on that to get your results. Bennett et. al.'s work ran one of these sorts of experiments, with one difference -- they used a dead salmon instead of living human subjects. And they got positive results. The same sort of experiment, the same methodology, the same results that people were bandying about as positive results. According to the methodology in common use, dead salmon can distinguish human facial expressions. Meaning one of two things:

I cannot overstate just how many papers were completely fucking destroyed by this experiment. Entire careers of particularly lazy scientists were built on these sorts of experiments. A decent chunk of modern experimental neuropsychology was resting on it. Which shows that science is like everything else -- the best advances are motivated by spite.

I just got a call at my office that cold opened with "hi, this is Janet from Intel and this call is regarding [long pause] the computer", which has got to be a record for the lowest-effort scam I've ever been pitched.

“Yeah... hi... uh... this is bank? ... um... we need money? [muffled: guys I really don’t think this is going to work] [unintelligible voices, followed by the headset coming closer to the speakers mouth making the next word much louder] Please?”

It's the pause before "the computer" that got me. Like, they stopped to think about their pitch. They paused, they pondered, and that's what they came up with.

here's a similarly low effort spam text I got once

I asked one once, "Which scam are you?" and they replied, "The energy bill one."

oops

These remind me of how my mom has always asked scammers, by name, how their mothers feel about what they do, and they hang up every time.

So earlier in art class today, someone drew a characters hands in their pockets and mentioned that hands are really like the ultimate end boss of art, and most of us wholeheartedly agreed. So then, our teacher went ahead and free handed like a handful of hands on the board, earning a woah from a couple of students. So the one from earlier mentioned how it barely took the teacher ten seconds to do what I can’t do in three hours. And you know what he responded?

“It didn’t take me ten seconds, it took me forty years.”

And you know, that stuck with me somehow. Because yeah. Drawing a hand didn’t take him fourth years. But learning and practicing to draw a hand in ten seconds did. And I think there’s something to learn there but it’s so warm and my brain is fried so I can’t formulate the actual morale of the lesson.

ay kid, you like readin? then keep your eye on the birdie cause all you need for this card trick is a US address, a phone number, the date your folks popped you out, and a first and last name

you put those figures in this form right here

then theyre gonna give you a little somethin under the table, pro bono

take that card number and pin and bring it over to this site right over here

badabing badaBOOM you now got access to every ebook, audiobook, and magazine under the sun PLUS those ebooks can go straight to kindle. yeah. a real soft on your eyes type

now scram

and dont say i never did nothin for ya

Dan Piraro, Bizarro Comics 2006

Pirates being exempt from the "its unrealistic to have disabled people in [insert fantasy/historic setting here]" argument will never not be just a little funny to me for the sheer obsurdity of it. Like, no, there's no way a guy who lost his leg would survive in this setting!! It's so silly and immersion breaking to even consider it!!! Oh, what's that? He says "yarrrr" a lot, has a pet bird, and lives on a boat? Oh well, never mind then, that's not a disability anymore, obviously!

Do you know how hard it is to walk with even modern prosthetics on boats, let alone with what's essentialy a glorified chair leg tied to your body?? I can say from experience it's very, very difficult. Walking with a peg leg in general, is also very difficult, also speaking from experience lol.

I do realise this wasn't really the point of the post, but it made me think about this, lol

Bizarro is always on point.

this is so funny and a perfect example of a bad graph

Fanfic Thieves on Youtube

A collection of youtube channels have been uploading preexisting fanfictions in videos with little to no credit to the original authors. These are not podfics, these channels copy-paste the fics into text-to-speech readers then upload the unaltered audio over static or unrelated backgrounds, either art that is also stolen or mobile game footage. In addition to not naming the authors, they alter the title to make it that much harder for readers to recognize or find the original uploads. Some go so far as to pretend they themselves are creating the fics in question. Many claim that their stealing actually helps give fics "exposure" despite the intentional steps they take to conceal the origins of the fics they profit off of. However, this practice has lead many authors to discontinue fics after the frustration of having their hard work stolen. Many of these channels claim they will remove videos upon request, but will either argue with the author in order to keep it up, or simply unlist the video for a time until they think the author isn't paying attention anymore. And their solution to receiving strikes against their channels in the past has been to further obfuscate the origins of their content instead of even considering asking first.

”I got caught stealing, so instead of not stealing anymore, I’m doubling down on stealing even more so it’s harder for people to find out and prove I’m stealing. Stealing doesn't count if the specific person I stole from didn't call me out. I am the real victim.”

That, plus the incessant tag scumming in all the videos (spamming unrelated tags in order to appear in more search results) proves to me that these are lazy attention seekers who don't want to put in creative effort when they could just leech off of the passion of others.

In order to report them, go to their channel's "About" page and click the flag icon. Said icon might be behind the three dots in the top bar on mobile. Go to "Report User" at the bottom and tick the "spam and scams" button. This will allow you to list multiple videos as offenders instead of reporting them individually. Youtube's policy states that video spam constitutes:

If you recognize one of your fics among the stolen, say so in the additional comments box, and perhaps call out the channel directly in the video's comments. If you recognize someone else's fic, please let the original author know so they can report the channel as well. Many have been confronted for stealing previously and refuse to admit wrongdoing.

Most of what I've found has been My Hero Academia fics since that's my fandom and those are the ones I can recognize as stolen, but there are many other channels that steal from other fandoms, so I invite anyone and everyone to reblog this with their own findings.

The reality is that this extremely low-effort content and new youtube channels are both very easy to make, so most likely they'll start new channels once the ones on this list are run through. But hopefully, if we all work together and keep whacking these moles, perhaps we can instill that same defeatism they caused so many creators who didn't deserve it, and eventually they'll give up.

My sincerest thanks to everyone who helped bring additional channels to my attention. A special thanks to ao3 user InArduisFidelis who brought the initial attention to the issue, and @owlf45 whose work was stolen.

Links under the cut.

Y’ALL STFU AND LOOK AT THIS SHIT I DESIGNED IN 3 DAYS IN A FUGUE STATE

@callmebliss

*delighted yelling* I would like to purchase the pattern pleeeeeeeeease!!!!

did you guys know the acting Don of the gambino crime family was assassinated in 2017 and it was the first time a don got assassinated in decades but it wasn't a mob hit it was a qanon cultist who was trying to make a citizen's arrest on the guy like he'd tried to do on multiple politicians by now and he believed that trump would protect him which is why he turned up for his hearing with qanon sigils scribbled on his hands and at the moment the trial is suspended cause the dude's a fruit loop and he's probably gonna get killed if he goes inside because the mob ain't what they used to be but paying one dude to kill one guy should be something they can swing. anyway i learned this because i was trying to figure out who the gambinos are beefing with because my bf asserted that the opposite of Childish Gambino would be Adult Dracula