spam email that starts off with “Behold!” is setting a damn high bar for itself

Broke: Starting your spam email with “Behold!”

Woke: Starting your spam email with “Hwaet!”

Muse, tell me the story of a complicated man, the man who sold aluminium extrusion at an incredible price,

I sing of arms and the man who first from the shores of Troy, exiled by fate came to Italy and Lavinian shores, with a really unnaturally large dick, here look at these pills they’ll change your life.

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote

And bathed every veyne in swich licour,

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,

And smale foweles maken melodye,

That slepen al the nyght with open eye-

(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);

Thanne longen folk to save up to 80% during our Easter mega-savings sale event

@bbcphile @bifilthatonthatseson

I can’t even…

@copperbadge

If you don’t know

Whose signs these are

A Nigerian Prince needs

Your account numbers

Spam Email

@ineptshieldmaid

(source)

O M G

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

tHIS WAS THE ONE TIME STAR TREK GOT PSYCHOLOGY RIGHT, actually!!!

Humans are biologically programmed that during the acquisition of language if something is pointed at and a word is said, we assume that word is a NOUN. Every human in every culture and every language does this. But there’s nothing to say in an alien language their biology would be the same. That word could just as easily be an adjective or a verb or the objects location in space or a million other things.

Good job Star Trek. Just this once, you managed to not piss off every psych student to watch your shows.

In linguistics, this is known as the gavagai problem: 

Story concept of the day: a sentient AI falls in love with a minimum wage retail worker from the tech company’s gift shop and decides the best way to make her happy is to fix society.

HEAVY shenanigans as the AI’s plans range from “reprogram the automated pay roll to give everyone a raise” to “expose everyone involved in government corruption who has ever touched a cell phone”

The catalyst to all of this is a day where the AI was being updated and it caused glitches in the whole system, including the registers in the gift shop.

The human woman really is just a pretty regular person, but she has a good chunk of hyper empathy and does that thing where you talk to computers when they aren’t doing what they’re supposed to.

Without even knowing there WAS an AI she spent the day muttering encouragement to the computer like it was a person and the AI ADORES her now.

How mundane the AI’s motivation is forms the basis for how unstoppable it is and the intensity of the chaos it caused. There’s no grand morality involved— it’s just affection for someone who treated you kindly and the desire to ease their suffering.

Help support PhyloPic!

Hey Tumblr,

I don’t usually share this kind of stuff on tumblr, but this is a project that I do feel is worthwhile. PhyloPic is a project to provide free-use silhouettes of organisms of all kinds, and it’s an excellent resource that I’ve used many times.

The project has already found a great deal of internet success; I can personally attest to seeing images from PhyloPic often in scientific papers. And it’s not just on a species-by-species basis - the project also arranges organisms by taxonomy. This means you can search practically any taxon and see its full illustrated evolutionary history, down to the first DNA - or add multiple taxa, and compare their evolutionary histories, seeing when they last diverged.

Play around with it for a while - it’s a great educational tool in addition to a great bank of images! But after playing around with it, you’ll notice that it’s pretty slow. This is a passion project of Mike Keesey, well-known Internet Dinosaur Person™, and it needs work to re-engineer it to make it faster and more functional. This update will also add new search functions, including sorting by license, an improved taxonomic search, and allowing users to “save” silhouettes for later use. 

PhyloPic is currently running an IndieGoGo campaign to try and raise money to make these improvements. There’s five days left in their campaign, and they’re over halfway to their goal! If just half of my followers gave a dollar, the project would be fully funded. I think it’s a worthwhile project, and it’s one that I’d like to see succeed.

Here’s a link to the IndieGoGo campaign!

I wasn’t going to reblog - but this has crossed my dash half a dozen times today and NOBODY has stepped up for the bottom left.

In other news, apparently I too have a favourite stovetop burner.

the sad thing is is tumblr thought they had to monetize through ads, so they had to do this so they could get reputable advertisers, but

like

if they had just hired some people to actually cultivate a good website and then asked us how we’d like the site monetized? we could have come up with something

on NPR today they were talking to The Guardian, the UK paper. Asking one of their execs how it is, exactly, in the era of dying print media, The Guardian stays afloat without charging to access their online content. 

And they explained that when it became clear that the industry was irreversibly changing, they asked thousands of their readers to come in over the course of a weekend and sat them down in groups and asked what they would like the revenue model to look like going forward, keeping in mind that the paper would still need to bring in a profit somehow. The overwhelming response was “I am willing to pay for this to be free for everyone”. So The Guardian is funded by subscribers who pay because they think it’s a worthwhile service, even though all the content is available for free. 

Which is also, incidentally, how things like NPR (and Maximum Fun podcasts) are funded. And how Wikipedia is funded. And how many people run their patreons - no exclusives. You just pay because you want to support the product. It’s how a lot of the best stuff in the internet age is funded.

Other online media (whether it’s patreon or podcasts or video games or w/e) offer tiny inconsequential but fun benefits for paying. Maybe tumblr donors get cute options for frames for their icons. Maybe they get access to extra themes. Pay more on this video game for a fun skin for your character that doesn’t change the gameplay. Pay more on tumblr and you can have animated icons. Something different could’ve been done.

I mean, for us to be willing to pay for it, they’d also need to try to build a functioning website. Something they’ve been royally fucking up for years now. Still no easy blacklist, limited search features, limited privacy features, links breaking everywhere… 

But if @staff had made a real good faith effort to create a good user experience that prevented bots and protected users and then asked us 1) what kind of site we wanted 2) what income model we’d prefer to support, I feel like we could’ve come up with something. 

As it is the site is in a downward spiral and that sucks.

rather than death of the author i subscribe to a critical framework i like to refer to as Schrodinger’s Author where the authors intentions are important except for when i dont like them

Photo Manipulations of Justin Peters

Germany-based graphic designer Justin Peters uses his Photoshop skills to create fantastical landscapes and creatures. Justin uses only photography found on stock imagery sites as the source material for his digital collages. You can see more of his recent work on Instagram.

i just walked past the apartment beneath mine and through an open window i could hear my downstairs neighbor crying faintly while the song jolene played in the background and im just like… bitch are you okay…?

I actually ended up going back downstairs to check on her and brought some leftover cookies I baked this afternoon. she’s very sweet and going through a Breakup Mood™️ after being cheated on. she’s coming over to my gf and I’s annual bad movie night on Friday and she even let me pet her cat named Clarence

my gf thinks it’s funny but very fitting that our downstairs neighbor was able to summon a concerned lesbian just by playing jolene while crying about being done dirty by a man

whyyyyyy

Wasn’t this the toy that scared a kid real bad so they ran away screaming only since it follows sound it just chased this poor screaming kid all over the place?

yep that’s the one

The monsters have found another way to get energy while making both sides happy, good for them!

So now even toy electronic pets need warnings on what you’re getting into when you buy them. 

You know that trope where an evil villain makes toys so every kid will bring them into their home and then they can strike? This is what happens when a villain does that, but gives up on the evil attack part when they realize sales alone would be more lucrative than the resulting super-crime.

Lark from Tamora Pierce’s Circle Of Magic. 

“why are pillowfort/ao3 asking for money?? Tumblr and LJ are free!!!”

y'all really don’t get how this works, huh?

Look y'all. Bottom line is large websites/web apps are fucking expensive

It’s not like a personal or small business site where you pay $25/mo for a shared hosting package and knock yourself out

You need multiple, dedicated, high-performance servers to handle a service like Tumblr or AO3, or Facebook, or what have you, to keep up with the insane amount of bandwidth and unfathomable amount of data.

Shit cost thousands of dollars a month. And those costs only go up the more users you have. Into the tens of thousands of dollars a month. Someone has to foot the bill for it. And that doesn’t include the salaries of the developers who pour hours of their time into making things function the way they need to.

“but Tumblr used to not have ads!!” you say! “They just got greedy!”

No, they didn’t “just get greedy”. This is how free services work. They aren’t magically able to sustain themselves. At any point. Ever.

Investors see proof of concept during the infancy of a project, and they pour their money– hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars– to 1) help fund the project into maturity. (Maturity = stable performance and a large, growing userbase) and 2) have a seat at the table when big decisions are made

Until that point, you won’t see ads, or be nagged to donate, or forced to pay a fee to access your content. That’s no accident.

Investors eat the cost of running and developing the service, because they know that once that userbase has been established, they can– you guessed it– SELL YOUR DATA TO ADVERTISERS.

They can’t do that until after they have users for advertisers to sell their shit to!

That’s how the investors make their money back, that’s how the service becomes profitable instead of being a giant cash pit.

So for the love of God, can we PLEASE stop slandering sites like AO3, Wikipedia, and now Pillowfort for having the audacity to ask for donations, or for having tiered/paid membership options for additional, non-essential features??

If you’re not paying, you’re the product

If you’re not paying, you’re the product

And pillowfort, at least, is a one off $5 fee while the site is in development for people who missed the free beta.

That’s ... fairly reasonable really. That’s not even $5 a month. That’s $5 the one time!

Are straight white people okay????

What is this?!

People like this exist. Interesting.

this story has a part 2

THERE IS A PART 3 WITH GUEST RESPONSES I REPEAT THERE IS A PART 3 THIS IS NOT A DRILL

I thought things couldn’t get more horrifyingly amusing than the woman who wanted people to pay $1000 each to go to her wedding so she could “feel like a Kardashian for a day” and had a Facebook breakdown about it saying she was gonna go backpacking in Peru to “find herself” after being “betrayed” by her friends who didn’t want to partake but here we are

I thought it was the same person ngl.

I’m in the wedding shaming group and saw both this and the Peru post before it went viral. Love it.

THERE’S AN UPDATE

Stephanie is a true hero.

my favorite thing about this update is that the fact that we are even SEEING this means there’s AT LEAST one other snitch in the party that she hasn’t caught yet

Harm and the past

Is a pretty common statement lately, particularly about abuse and assault, but I think it’s more a matter of

“People should be held accountable for things they did 40 years ago because they have had 40 years to redeem their actions and they chose not to. Because they have had 40 years to admit what they had done, change their behavior and try to repair some of the damage done. That’s 14.600 days, and on every day they chose to benefit from keeping their acts a secret, which was a new day on which they inflicted harm on their victims. Every day of secrecy, more harm.”

THAT’s what’s going on.

Becoming a better person is possible. Which doesn’t mean ‘all is forgiven’, or ‘we all act like it never happened’. What it means is: a person can realize that their behavior was horrible, stop doing it, admit their acts and accept the consequences and try to fix the parts of the damage that can be fixed. And while they will never stop being the person that once did the harm, they will be a better person in the now. That process, not the passing of time, is what matters in how we treat someone’s history of harmful behavior. And in these old cases, that process was never started, instead harm was continued.

It’s not about deciding what acts are ‘irredeemable‘, it’s about acknowledging the incredible harm done not just by the act but by the silence that followed it.