Speak of the devil... [说曹操...]

i get so freaked out by like. pictures of really big rope

I’d like to say that’s normal but I’m a frayed knot

i’m so fucking annoyed at this, just for that you don’t get photos of the rope

i changed my mind, this is just too horrifying not to share

it’s called a Hawser and is the thick cable or rope used for towing/mooring a ship

in conclusion, i have nightmares beyond description

NO it would NOT be cool

well i fucken disagree

@scumrunner do you have any cursed facts about hawsers to share ?

As a fiber nerd, i am personally very enthusiastic about them….

Ohhohohoho DO I EVER. Meet the “snapback zone,” not an area with cool hats, but instead the unintuitive range at which a hawser can kill you if it breaks under tension.

What if we kissed in the snap-back zone? 😳 😳 😳

I don’t think you guys understand how much force this is, a tow rope used to move a 20 foot boat snaps under tension with enough force to dent metal, shatter glass and seriously injure anyone in its way. A Hawser on the other hand… Well I’ve seen a concrete pier with a chuck the size of a sedan ripped out of it by a line failure, and anecdotally, I’ve heard of a 2 ton heavy cargo forklift being skidded sideways, then knocked over. These lines snap with enough force to noticably dent the hull armor of navy ships.

This is a line designed to hold in place a moving object that can be easily in excess of 10000 tons. AND THEY CAN BREAK FROM THAT TENSION ALONE.

THESE THINGS ARE TERRIFYING RUBBER BANDS FROM HELL.

Nope Rope

TIL there are only around 120 anonymous Michelin restaurant inspectors in the world. They spend 3 out of every 4 weeks on the road, and must vacate a region for 10 years if they think a restaurant suspects their identity.

via reddit.com

Imagine thinking your spouse is a sexy secret agent for decades only to find out he’s a restaurant critic for fat tire boy magazine

Better yet imagine a real spy getting in trouble and mistaking a restaurant critic for a fellow agent. But the critic takes their job very seriously and won’t reveal themselves and so gets pulled into some kind of huge dangerous conspiracy whilst continuing to take notes on the quality of every restaurant they almost get shot in.

so i spent far too long on this.

for those unaware, the spaghetti wall of letters and numbers is a base64-encoded JPEG image (and not a URL as some guessed). in certain cases when you tried to insert/paste an image into what’s ostensibly a text-only box, this could happen.

the thing that’s bugging me however is that there’s image data there. we have fairly a clear (albeit with JPEG artifacts) screenshot of text that, thanks to how Windows ClearType renders text, each character is identical to each other, that is to say, an uppercase Q will always look more or less pixel-perfect each time, meaning we don’t have to guess what a Q looks like, we simply have to pixel-accurate match it.

as an aside, this is why regular OCR struggles so much with this kind of data retrieval, such as code even when it’s clearer than a physical paper scan. ordinarily, OCR will try to best-guess every single letter because it expects each letter to be slightly different from each other (as would be the unpredictable nature in a scanned document), and on top of that most OCR today will try to autocorrect because it expects the scanned text to contain words in some human written language.

so, all we have to do is make a program to recognize each character and piece back together the whole base64 string, right? well…

first i stitched all 7 images back into a single block of text, observing the consistency of the line spacing. some of the screenshots have little bits of the previous one sticking out of it, which helps with alignment and to make sure they’re in the right order.

after that i had to sample every single letter off this file. this means going around the file and finding one example of each different character we’re trying to identify, saving it as its own separate file so that the program can load them as references to compare against in the full image. for base64, the alphabet consists of a-z, A-Z, 0-9, +, / and =. once i had the initial code in place…

…close! but oh so far. if any one single character in a base64 string is wrong or missing, the resulting decode will be wrong. the issues i was having were mostly with the lowercase r and j because of how the kerning affected the pixels around those letters. i was also getting false matches for r where there should be an m. what followed was grueling hours of tweaking the matching code and my known font set to better fit the original image and get as close as possible to a 100% match. here is the resulting code, maybe it’ll be useful for someone and this won’t have been a complete waste of time.

once i was confident through the verification image that i had all characters recognized, i put it through a base64 to JPEG decoder. i actually did this several times as i improved the recognition and what follows is the best result that came out of it yet. i suspect some of the data might be missing (perhaps a line or block of text got lost in between screenshots), or i have a wrong character somewhere resulting in a wrong value. this is the image extracted from OP’s base64 string:

we can finally know what they meant when they said “me in a relationship” and i can finally go the fuck to sleep.

update: i found that the string that i used to decode the image in the previous reblog actually had one letter wrong.

with this it still doesn’t parse as fully valid base64 in strict mode so i think there’s still another letter in there that’s wrong, but i couldn’t find it. however this gives us a better look:

and this is finally enough to do a reverse image search. i present to you, the HD version of our intrepid massive backpacker:

still have no idea what they mean by “me in a relationship” with that, though.

#they have baggage

Also:

Aaaaaaaand

Also consider:

And!

Reblog the writers’ fortune cookie for luck!

Guys I reblogged this and then wrote an 8000 word story I didn’t even have a solid plan for. Reblog this shit.

Here

Buffins! From the book ‘Cats Cats Cats Cats Cats Cats’ by John R. Gilbert, 1961.

I just....I just learned that there's a word in the English language...for when you run into someone to hug them with all the enthusiasm and strength you have....I learned that it's called glomp.

My God, English has so many words to describe physical intimacy, I'm in love

The default length of pasta is designed to fit on a supermarket shelf, not to be the best length for cooking/eating.

Feel free to break it to any length you want (don't let the Italians know I said this)

Make sure I fit in the pot at least.

Shorter pasta could definitely fit on a store shelf. Longer pasta however...

Free yourself of corporate interests and demand comically and inconviently long pasta

Pasta so long it can't fit in your car and you gotta tie it to the roof. Pasta so long you gotta cook it outside because your ceiling is too low.

I think space filling pasta would be the best of all worlds. Easy to fit on shelves, long, and fits in the pot without breaking!

Good luck manufacturing it, but I think it could be done by extrusion and chopping, but I don't know if it'd be spaghetti still

Something like this?

But in a little over 4 months it's gonna be m

The Beast that Bothers

Can we get a hell yeah for a lady in armor?

Modern art