Can Thomas change his ways for good?

It’s heartwarming to see the cast’s sympathy for Thomas:

- Raquel Cassidy

- Allen Leech

Also pleased to see Jim Carter (aka Mr. Carson) speaking well of Thomas for once.

This interview is my fantasy of what everyone at Downton realised at the end of the series.

CUTENESS OVERLOAD!!!❤❤❤

[Mabli on Michael Sheen's lap and in front of them dolls of Aziraphale and Crowley]

Mabli: Daddy.

[Michael points at Aziraphale] Daddy. [and then he points at Crowley] Who's that?

Mabli: Mmmmmm. Uncle David.

That's my 15 minutes of fame, I peaked in my life, I made those dolls and gave them to Michael yesterday evening at the stage door, I'm so happy they liked them and I'm also absolutely out of my mind. 😱

They are 2 sets, actually, for the two girlies ❣️

Happy International Museums Day to the following people:

#OP WHAT DO YOU MEAN

While pretty and sparkly on the inside, the outer shell of a geode is incredibly hard, just like the man who was viewing them.

Writing fanfiction for Lord of the Rings: I reach back through the decades to take JRR Tolkien’s hand. I will tell the queer story that you could not tell in life, my friend, carefully uncovering a narrative from within the lines of your tale, illuminating the hints and moments of emotion that perhaps even you did not fully understand

Writing fanfiction for Sherlock Holmes: hey Arthur Conan Doyle quick question did you MEAN to create a queer icon or did you just have dinner with Oscar Wilde once and thought 'what if he solved crimes'? I don't really care either way. He’s escaped his enclosure and lives in my brain now. we're having fun

my family is fucking addicted to macgyvering and it's becoming a problem. every time something in this house breaks, instead of doing the sensible thing of replacing it or calling someone qualified to fix it, we all group around the offending object with a manic look in our eyes and everyone gets a try at fixing it while being cheered on or ridiculed by the rest.

it's a beautiful bonding activity, but the "creative" fixes have turned our house into a quasihaunted escape room like contraption where everything works, but only in the wonkiest of ways. you need a huge block of iron to turn on the stove. the oven only works if a specific clock is plugged in. the bread machine has a huge wood block just stapled to it that has become foundational to its function. sometimes when you use the toaster the doorbell rings. and that's just the kitchen.

it's all fun and games until you have guests over and you have to lay out the rules of the house like it's a fucking board game. welcome to the beautiful guest room. don't pull out the couch yourself you need a screwdriver for that, and that metal rod makes the lamp work so don't move it. it also made me a terrifying roommate in college, because it makes me think i can fix anything with enough hubris and a drill. you want to call the landlord about a leaky faucet? as if. one time my dad made me install a new power socket because we ran our of extension cords

to the people saying this isn't safe in the tags: my dad has a engineering degree and my brother is a mechanic this is like. state sanctioned macgyvering. safe sane and consensual macgyvering. our house will not burn down. in fact, i think it has made us all better in approaching problems from all angles when they arise, which has served me well in life, especially in high stress situations.

does our hot water switch off every thirty seconds making showers an exiting exercise in counting and resilience? yes. but one time the door of the train toilet broke, trapping me inside, and i went "well i can either succumb to the panic of claustrophobia or do this family-style" and then spent twenty minutes breaking down the lock with my shoelace and the belt i was wearing. so i'll take the cold water any day

Never have I wanted to see inside a stranger's home more

OP lives in a point-and-click adventure game

spock’s room decor is actually fucking bonkers. The weapons??? the big red velvet curtain??? like ok phantom of the opera go crazy.

for reference jim’s room has some photos and a plant so we can surmise this is uniquely a spock being a dramatic weirdo thing

You are judging Spock’s room through human associations tastes. Remember, Vulcan blood is green and the planet Vulcan is red (Discovery even adds to this by showing red trees around Sarek’s property).

On Vulcan, red is the color of nature, so (assuming Vulcans even assign meaning to colors), red is likely a very calm and soothing color choice. Green is probably the Vulcan color of passion and/or danger.

From a Vulcan perspective, Spock’s room is a cozy cottage core with some historical knickknacks hung around.

Kirk’s green carpet, green plants, green lighting room is the Vulcan equivalent of a boudoir at best or blood-stained slaughterhouse at worst.

so what you're saying is Vulcan children's hospitals-

The midjourney stuff just reminds of when we were trying to find a new platform to host the ao3 donation form, and companies kept trying to tell me about all their "ai" features that would track donor engagement, and figure out the optimal pattern to email individual donors asking for follow up donations, and all the ways they suggest we manipulate people into staying on our websites. It was a great way to filter out who either wasn't listening to us when we described our ethics and donor base, or just didn't believe us.

Now granted ao3 is a unique case based on a) the amount of page views we get in any given time period and b) the fact that most donors absolutely do Not want to be identified as such anywhere, (the default "list of recent donors" module got nuked Immediately) but it surprised me some that the concept of "donors who value their privacy and would be furious at even the whiff of AI" is unique. Some of us really are just existing in different worlds.

Op's tags

#I just started dropping '2.5 Billion page views a month'#into conversations as early as possible bc they would Not believe me otherwise#it was right up there with having to say 'csam attacks' to get them to take my compartmentalization of information concerns seriously#turns out those are the magic words#otw#op

The last part was kind of insane, honestly. When we started changing platforms for the donor database, I kept telling them that yes I was aware we already had an account for the volunteer database, and no that could not be connected to the donor database. And they said yes fine sure and then connected them anyway. And I called them back and said, excuse me, I'm confused, I can see both databases. And they said, well, yeah, but it's only you, someone has to be able to see both databases to give other users access. The other users can't see both. And I said, no, we have been asking for a completely separate database. I should not be able to see both. And they said, you are one organization, one organization can't have two databases. And I said, last year someone used our volunteer email list to commit approximately one thousand felonies. Please feel free to imagine how much worse it could have been had they had a way to use volunteers' email addresses to get their legal names. We do not want this to be something anyone can do no matter how much we trust them. Let me describe those felonies to you in more detail. And they emailed me two hours later and said, you can have two separate databases.

This post feels like watching an iceberg go by in clear water. The amount of stuff going on beneath the surface of AO3 just astonishes.

they used to make smackable technology. you used to be able to hit your tv when it didn't work good.

when I was a kid I had an old tv in my room that would always turn to unwatchable static in the middle of shows but one night my sister and I were watching Naruto & every time Kakashi was on-screen the static cleared so we were like “hahaha the tv looooves Kakashi.”

I had a Kakashi bookmark so we held it up against the screen as a joke but the static actually cleared up. Mystified, we tried different bookmarks and objects with the same plastic material but nothing else worked, only the Kakashi bookmark.

We ended up taping it to the corner of the screen and it stayed there for 11 years until we moved out. When I was older people would be like “can you move the bookmark off the screen” bc it did sort of block a bit of the view but I would demonstrate the static issue and everyone was always just like “huh. what the hell?? well…alright.”

No explanation, but thanks Kakashi.

Actually no, I've found my favorite bizarre Facebook Christian AI art spam image

Another interesting genre (as in I've seen several variations on the theme) is "3D picture of Jesus in vaguely intimate pose with what appears to be a South Korean flight attendant":

My stepbrother keeps getting flight attendant with Jesus AI on his fb feed!! A selection he has screenshotted:

Ooh, I hadn't seen any where Jesus was, himself, an airplane

MOMMY FORGOT MY CALMING BANANA

He got fired for that tweet,,,,

he saw his reflection for the first time

Thinking about when I worked at a shitty restaurant + one night it was just me + 3 other women on closing shift, so some guy came in the back and waved a knife around, presumably for money but I’m not actually certain, bc he was met with the bartender holding a much bigger knife, a tiny teenager wielding a cast iron pan, an elderly woman holding up a crockpot of clearly boiling water, and me, turning on the meat slicer with eye contact for maximum effect. He left, but the moral of the story is not girl power or whatever, it’s just. Why the fuck would you threaten a room full of underpaid and sleep-deprived blue-collar workers surrounded by lethal weapons.

Even ignoring the quantity of workers or weaponry, I think there’s something special about specifically

not the

not the shar

not the sharpest kn

*nods wisely* not the sharpest knool in the shed

“The story tells you what happens” acceptable, expected, standard fare.

“They story never tells you what happens but the implications are there” losing my mind, chewing the drywall, punching patrons on the bus, throwing myself in the river

If you do this though people will message you for clarifications until the end of time

In fairness they will also do this about things that are perfectly clear in the text

this is lara, a cisgender butch woman who was hate-crimed by other women for trying to use a “female-only space”. a space, by their logic, she should have been able to use and is apparently meant to be her safe space.

this is the result of terf transphobia. please remember lara and others like her next time terfs claim that they care about butch women or that you can “always tell”.

I’m so sorry this happened to you, lara 💔 🫂