there is no neutrality politics - as long as you’re a human being with emotions and a brain you’ll feel one way or another whether or not you realize it. try talking to a self identified centrist about anything and you’ll see how fast skew right wing. read “both sides” media coverage and you’ll notice that one side is lacking more context and information or even simply worded to sound more negative. actually think and read before taking claims of fairness and neutrality at face value
the one thing I really dislike about the titanfall 2 community is all the “haha schizo pills” jokes
Like just stop, it ain’t funny. It’s really not funny.
hallucinations and delusions aren’t just haha what if this thing I wish existed actually existed. Hallucinations are actually fucking terrifying if you actually had to deal with them on a regular basis then I can assure you that you wouldn’t joke about it
Dr. Norman Finkelstein, whose parents were both Holocaust survivors, has a book about this very thing. “The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering” posits that the memory of the Nazi Holocaust is exploited by elements of the American Jewish community for political and financial gain, and to further Israeli interests. According to Finkelstein, this “Holocaust industry” has corrupted Jewish culture and the authentic memory of the Holocaust.
He’s fine btw. They expected his immune system to react in weird ways but mostly he’s fine and at lower risk of catching and transmitting COVID, and of developing long COVID. He’s fine.
what do you think of the argument that anti zionism is anti judaism because a high % of jews are zionists, so if you say youre anti zionist you just dont listen to jews and secretly hate people for being jewish. i feel like it's obviously wrong but also i dont know how to say 'its not wrong to hate fascism just because a lot of jews bought into nationalist fascist propaganda' without seeming hugely antisemitic as a goy lol
its a bullshit point. ideology is not an unchanging thing thats tethered to certain ethnic/religious groups. thats closer to a fascist, racialist worldview than anything else. if you said we cant criticize something pertaining to a group because the majority of this group of people believe in it or are ok with it you couldnt criticize capitalism or popular culture or american imperialism or really say anything thats not already a hegemonic belief. its also just factually a bad argument that relies on limited and biased data, and ignores that there has been a purposeful campaign to crush dissent and ostracize or persecute left wing jews and anti zionists in the jewish community for the past like 70 years, you cant say this is a natural ideological formation. i have some things addressing this tagged on my blog as zionism or anti zionism ill link them here in a second
I love going viral on tumblr.com. It’s like if you stood in a field and said some of the stupidest shit a human being is capable of and then like fifty thousand crows attacked you
For which he was the first engineer to be called a “steely-eyed missile man”.
The full story is amazing.
So Apollo 12 was struck by lightning 36 seconds after liftoff, which caused a power surge for obvious reasons. Instruments began to malfunction, telemetry was garbled, and the Flight Director was about to order the mission aborted.
However, a year before, Aaron had been observing a test at Kennedy Space Center and noticed some unusual readings during the test. On his own, he dug into the data and equipment, and found that the weird readings came from the little known Signal Conditioning Equipment (SCE) system, and that it could be set to Auxiliary, allowing it to operate in low-power settings.
So he’d seen the readings of Apollo 12 before… and knew what to do. And gave the recommendation, “set SCE to Aux”, which was passed up by the Flight Director and CAPCOM to Apollo 12. They obeyed the order, and what looked like a disaster in the making–the freaking spaceship was HIT BY LIGHTNING!–was averted, as telemetry was restored, and Apollo 12 went to the Moon without incident.
Let me just repeat that:
The spaceship was hit by lightning, and this guy knew exactly which switch to flip to fix it.
i really hope that photomatt’s meltdown fucking follows him. i hope that he’s forever associated with this, and that any time someone hears his name, they think of the fucked up shit he pulled. i hope it ends up being synonymous with a childish fucking tantrum.
I wish that “hammer car explosion” and its context becomes as infamous and memed on as “man door hand hook car door”.
I also hope Matt gets bitten 2037543920473919566013 times by furbies in the span of less than a second✌️
I don’t want the funny meme where eventually everyone forgets that this was all over the blatant abuse and harassment of trans women to be what is remembered. I want it to be Matt, and his shit ass behavior. I want it remembered that Matt Photomatt Mullenweg had a fucking meltdown. A meltdown directed entirely at trans women, one trans woman in particular, where he misgendered her, lied about it, chased her off a platform he owns, and then stalked and harassed her further on another platform entirely where he is STILL lying about her.
I don’t give a shit about funny hammer car explosion meme.
I want him remembered for the monstrous shit he’s doing to real actual people and how he held all the cards and tried to use his position of power over another person, a trans woman, and threw a crybaby shitfit and deleted all his posts about it except for his continuous lies and harassment to her to be what’s remembered.
Fuck the memery.
This is the type of shit trans people routinely put up with, and its ignored blatantly. Trans women especially are made out to be sexual deviants, predators, and dangerous and more oft than not remembered as such. I want Matt to go down as a fucking freak for trying to pull this and do it so blatantly.
i really hope that photomatt’s meltdown fucking follows him. i hope that he’s forever associated with this, and that any time someone hears his name, they think of the fucked up shit he pulled. i hope it ends up being synonymous with a childish fucking tantrum.
I wish that “hammer car explosion” and its context becomes as infamous and memed on as “man door hand hook car door”.
I also hope Matt gets bitten 2037543920473919566013 times by furbies in the span of less than a second✌️
I don’t want the funny meme where eventually everyone forgets that this was all over the blatant abuse and harassment of trans women to be what is remembered. I want it to be Matt, and his shit ass behavior. I want it remembered that Matt Photomatt Mullenweg had a fucking meltdown. A meltdown directed entirely at trans women, one trans woman in particular, where he misgendered her, lied about it, chased her off a platform he owns, and then stalked and harassed her further on another platform entirely where he is STILL lying about her.
I don’t give a shit about funny hammer car explosion meme.
I want him remembered for the monstrous shit he’s doing to real actual people and how he held all the cards and tried to use his position of power over another person, a trans woman, and threw a crybaby shitfit and deleted all his posts about it except for his continuous lies and harassment to her to be what’s remembered.
Fuck the memery.
This is the type of shit trans people routinely put up with, and its ignored blatantly. Trans women especially are made out to be sexual deviants, predators, and dangerous and more oft than not remembered as such. I want Matt to go down as a fucking freak for trying to pull this and do it so blatantly.
i really hope that photomatt’s meltdown fucking follows him. i hope that he’s forever associated with this, and that any time someone hears his name, they think of the fucked up shit he pulled. i hope it ends up being synonymous with a childish fucking tantrum.
I wish that “hammer car explosion” and its context becomes as infamous and memed on as “man door hand hook car door”.
I also hope Matt gets bitten 2037543920473919566013 times by furbies in the span of less than a second✌️
I don’t want the funny meme where eventually everyone forgets that this was all over the blatant abuse and harassment of trans women to be what is remembered. I want it to be Matt, and his shit ass behavior. I want it remembered that Matt Photomatt Mullenweg had a fucking meltdown. A meltdown directed entirely at trans women, one trans woman in particular, where he misgendered her, lied about it, chased her off a platform he owns, and then stalked and harassed her further on another platform entirely where he is STILL lying about her.
I don’t give a shit about funny hammer car explosion meme.
I want him remembered for the monstrous shit he’s doing to real actual people and how he held all the cards and tried to use his position of power over another person, a trans woman, and threw a crybaby shitfit and deleted all his posts about it except for his continuous lies and harassment to her to be what’s remembered.
Fuck the memery.
This is the type of shit trans people routinely put up with, and its ignored blatantly. Trans women especially are made out to be sexual deviants, predators, and dangerous and more oft than not remembered as such. I want Matt to go down as a fucking freak for trying to pull this and do it so blatantly.
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.
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.
One of many pieces of information rarely discussed that has stuck with me in studying the Holocaust in a literacy class is that people who survived the death camps often did not survive starvation. It is very difficult for a severely malnourished body to recover from starvation. A severely malnourished body will struggle to process food at all, and many people die in the process of “refeeding.” This is called refeeding syndrome for this reason. Reintroducing food can and often is fatal without careful, medical guidance.
Starvation is one of the most common and effective forms of genocide. What makes it effective is that past a certain point, even if aid has been delivered, it is not enough to save someone from death by starvation. What also makes it effective is that withholding food is viewed as a passive consequence of political turmoil rather than an intentional act of violence among a people. You will see more people die from starvation in genocides across history because it is an effective way to kill many people without the use of state resources.
The starvation of Gaza is intentional. The United States and Israel may gesture that they are delivering or allowing aid into Gaza, but in reality they are active participants in the starvation of Gaza by destroying medical infrastructure, limiting the amount of aid “allowed” in, and blocking aid trucks from entering. Throwing food into Gaza by airdrop at this point in the genocide will not be enough without medical infrastructure to refeed a severely malnourished population. Many will die anyways. Many have already.
So the “food” that the US dropped to Gaza is MREs. Expired. Saw a stitch of this video from a woman saying this is the same thing they did with Hurricane Katrina survivors.
MREs are shelf stable for 7 years. Total. These ones were over 15 years old.
And ofc there were people in the comments being like “ummm well our military eats them just fine, they were expired when I was in the army too” THATS NOT OKAY THO?? NO ONE SHOULD BE FORCED TO EAT EXPIRED FOOD!
Fuck the US, fuck the Israeli government, and fuck you if you think that this is any kind of help to the people of Gaza. They’re starving to death and the US is sending expired applesauce while also giving bombs to their murderers.
Honestly even if you’re trans that’s no excuse for being an hp supporter. Rowling isn’t only transphobic. Yknow, the racism? The antisemitism? The sexism? Take some fucking accountability and let that franchise finally crash and burn.
I think one of the big strengths of fanfiction as a medium is that it can, on average, assume the reader has a way higher degree of familiarity with canon than like…canon can. If you’re in the Star Wars AO3 tag you probably like Star Wars enough to remember more things about it than the average Star Wars-enjoying-ten-year-old. Which makes it way easier for fanwriter a to get to the juicy stuff and really engage with the worldbuilding or minor characters without having to spell out like. Who Wedge Antilles is for everyone who forgot or never noticed him in the first place. You could write a book about Wedge in the old EU because EU readers could also be assumed to be serious fans, but you can’t make a new canon Disney+ show about him. Those cost money to make and are intended for a broader audience.
And all this means that like. A good fic writer can and often will surpass canon when it comes to like. Thematic resonance and stuff, because they can really dig into something. Star Trek 2009 gave Kirk a new, more generic tragic backstory because it couldn’t expect the average moviegoer to be familiar with Kirk’s old, way more interesting tragic backstory. (Frankly, I’m not sure jj abrams knew about TOS Kirk’s backstory) whereas I have read a LOT of well-written, interesting, deeply resonant fanfic examinations of Tarsus IV, and what it means for Kirk’s character that he’s a genocide survivor. Star Trek 2009 answers the question “why did Kirk cheat on the kobayashi maru?” With “‘cause his dad crashed a spaceship when he was a baby.” A close examination of TOS canon implies the answer is “because he lived through a real-life Kobayashi that did have a win option, but which wasn’t taken.” BUT—and this is significant—even the TOS canon movies can’t really assume knowledge of the full TOS tv show, so that implication is never examined or made explicit. Instead it’s fanfic (and maybe spin off novels? Idk I’ve only read 2 trek books, if there’s one out there that covers this that would be really cool) where we get dives into that thread, where Kirk gets a commendation for original thinking because he can look a testing board in the eye and say “I’ve seen what happens when someone is entrenched in this kind of thinking, and I cannot let it happen to me. I understand the lesson, but it’s not hypothetical anymore and it never will be. I did what I had to do.” And that’s interesting! That’s meaningful! That can’t happen in a summer blockbuster. But it can happen in fic, easily, and that’s a strength of fic, I think.
I hope you don’t mind me adding to this very good post, but in general i think the financial supremecy of movies and (more recently) tv has lead a lot of people to assume that the best stories can be interchanged between mediums. That every book can be adapted into a movie, every light novel into an anime, every movie into a video game etc etc
and that’s the same attitude that underlies all the ‘the goal of fanfic is to file of the serial numbers and publish it’ or 'fanfic isn’t real writing because real writing is novels and fanfic is usually structurally so different from a novel’ type of takes come from.
this assumption that the medium is largely coincidental to the story being told
when that’s just not true.
the very best adaptations always change things, because mediums are not interchangeable, and they fundamentally shape the stories told in them.
there are things you can do in fanfic that are simply not possible in a traditional novel, because you’re starting from that possition of love and knowledge, and because you aren’t bound by the need to be canon compliant, so you can ask questions like 'if these characters met in other lives, under different circumstances, what would they be like? how different would they be? how much of what makes them them is tied to the circumstances they found themselves in?’ or 'what was it like to not be the heroes, to not be actively involved in the cool exciting bits? what was it like to be a minor character, left behind to deal with the consequences’ because your audience is already invested, they’ll show up for questions like that in a way a movie or novel or tv audience wouldn’t.
there are things you can do in a podcast or radio play that are not possible in visual mediums like film or tv, because you’re relying on the audiences imagination. there’s a reason the best radio comedy tends to be surreal, and the best podcasts tend to be horror, those are both genres that thrive when the audience’s imagination is allowed to fill in blanks.
there are things you can do on TV that are not possible in a novel or a movie. the way WandaVision completely changed its visual style with each episode is something that would not work in any other genre, but it’s essential to the story. TV usually exists in very defined seasons, but cannot traditionally be consumed all in one go, which is not true of almost any other medium, and that dictates a specific type of pacing. combine that with the fact that it’s a visual medium, and you get something like the overarching stories of the 9th Doctor’s season of Doctor Who. No other medium could have delivered the resolution to that storyline as effectively.
Video games can force the audience to consider their own part in events. No movie could do what Spec Ops did, when it gives you a button prompt to commit a war crime, and then turns around and asks you why? why did you do that? was it too easy? do you think it felt like this when the US government committed the exact same war crime within living memory? Was it easy then too? A novel or a movie could show you walker doing this terrible thing, but it could never convey the point with the same effective simplicity, and it could never make you the audience feel culpable. only the author is responsible for the actions of the characters in a novel, but in a game, it’s the audience who bears that responsibility, and that allows for moral questions other mediums struggle to effectively convey.
Comics can tell stories that take three decades and ten different writers to tell. Movies can use silence more effectively than any other medium because cinemas give you a captive audience and close-ups means you can reliably assume they can see everything that’s happening (unlike theatre, which can use silence, but can’t assume everyone has a good view). Theatre provides real time audience interactivity and a very special and unique kind of suspension of disbelief. Professional wrestling can tell ongoing stories in real time over years or decades, and walk the line between fiction and reality. Novels can immerse you more fully in one person’s view of the world than any other medium (which also allows for information to be hidden from the reader without it feeling cheap the way it can when a movie does the same thing). Live oral storytelling allows the story to be adapted on the fly to fit audience reactions, allows for infinite variations of the same story, because no two tellings will ever be identical.
Fanfic isn’t a genre, not really. Fanfic has genres, but it isn’t a genre in and of itself. Fanfic is a medium, and like all mediums, it offers storytelling tools that are unique to it, that it does better than any other medium. and as OP pointed out, one of the big ones is that it can assume both familiarity and love from the audience to the characters depicted. We can stray far further afield from where we started in fanfic than the original creator ever could, because our anchors are not the narrative, but the characters.
not my meme but you all do know about this right? It feels like it’s getting buried right now and I feel like its proponents are trying to take advantage of that.
This is the first thing you can see on the project2025.org website
Reminder also that their definition of “radical left” is primarily people who are accepting of gender identity, desire any tightening of even one gun regulation, want to combat police corruption in any way, and don’t want a border wall.
My moods have highs and lows. My lows are the type where I have no will or desire to do anything, and I have to forcibly make myself think of ways to push myself into continuing to live against my will. My highs are when I wake up some morning and go “hmm, I think I’m going to bake bread today.”
don’t know if it had enough time to rise or if I kneaded it enough but it’s in the oven now!
full dishwasher kind of annoying actually. release me
🔲 tupperware follow
can we all agree that handwash onlys are attention seeking? you’re using the same dish soap as the rest of us but you need a sponge bath because you’re too good for a shower
🍳 cast-iron following
op some people will die if they’re washed with soap at all. unlike certain plastic divas dishes that claim to be “top row only” like that makes a fucking difference.
Just two tweets on why non-Black people really should not be using “Rest in Power” for the deaths of White people (even when they are allies for the cause):
genuinely one of the saddest parts of this new era of the internet is how hard it is to rick roll someone now. with people’s attention spans shortening so much, they wouldn’t even get through the first few bait seconds before clicking off the video. like i saw a comment that ended with “btw i made all of this up” and the replies kept treating it so seriously because none of them finished the entire 4 sentence comment. and We’re no strangers to love You know the rules and so do I (do I) A full commitment’s what I’m thinking of You wouldn’t get this from any other guy I just wanna tell you how I’m feeling Gotta make you understand Never gonna give you up Never gonna let you down Never gonna run around and desert you Never gonna make you cry Never gonna say goodbye Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you
something really cool happened today that i wanted to share:
my nephew is 9 years old, and a stereotypical little boy. he likes dinosaurs, minecraft, and ninjas.
today i walked in on him excitedly watching Nimona with my dad. (minor spoiler warning!)
i had never heard of it, but i sat down and watched some of it, just to see why he was so happy.
he started narrating it, anticipating parts of it, almost as if he’d seen it before. he had.
we didn’t get to finish it, but i watched it on my own, because it looked fun and i wanted to see how it ended.
and i loved it. it was a fun, exciting, fantastical adventure about the importance of acceptance people who are different to us.
and it had a very clear queer subplot.
one that my nephew hadn’t mentioned at all in his explanation of the film. his summary was “it’s about a monster who helps a knight that was framed for killing the queen”.
and honestly yeah, that is what the film was about.
before sharing it with us, he had watched it all, engrossed himself in the story, took it in entirely, and the part he cared about most was whether Nimona got her acceptance. he wasn’t indoctrinated, or confused, or questioning anything about himself.
he didn’t bat an eyelid over a gay love confession. he just enjoyed the film, raved about it, made my 60 year old dad watch the movie about the monster who didn’t fit in.
he’s still the same little boy who’s been asking us how to get a girlfriend.
the only thing a movie centred around queer and queer-coded characters taught my nephew was that those who are different to him are not monsters. that’s it.
ALT
