hey hellsite
Can we go ahead and stop teaching corvids how to use tools, it's getting spooky
he was sooooo pissed this dipshit was getting those blocks stuck in the pipe
We are assisting to Bird stone age and i want everyone to know how privileged we are to see ir.
I think it's important to let guys be gender non conforming without telling them they're a girl, cause actually misgendering people is still shit even when you are pro trans. "You're a girl, an egg waiting to crack, and that's ok" how about you are a boy and a man and it's still ok if you want to do something that doesn't align with traditional ideals of your gender. You can still be he/him in a skirt and makeup.
When people discuss classic novels written by women, there are three annoying, persistent trends which lead to about 90% of the bad commentary about those novels.
(a) Assuming that because the book was written by a woman, it's exclusively for women too.
(b) Viewing the heroine as a self-insert both for the author and for the presumedly female reader, rather than as an individual character with her own distinct personality.
(c) Viewing the male love interests just as objects of desire, rather than as individual, fully developed characters.
I've seen this thinking applied to the books of Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, and the Brontë sisters. It's hard to escape.
if anyone was wondering how they’re reporting statue melting day in charlottesville itself. it’s a good one.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2023/civil-war-monument-melting-robert-e-lee-confederate/
Here's videos. I've giffed some of them.
When your granddaddies fought a wholeass war over states' rights (to kidnap, enslave, forcibly detain without cause and traffick in human lives for the profit of the richest among you), you ought to be ashamed of them.
(note to texas: y'all's granddaddies fought TWO wholeass wars over this so do not start with me.)
[image description: a printed out flyer with the picture of a sleeping grey tabby cat on it. It has text on it that reads:
Muffin disclaimer
So you’ve ordered a muffin! We hope you’re up for a challenge.
Our wobbly tabby cat Bea REALLY likes muffins so there are a few things to be aware of if you have a muffin in the cat area.
- She WILL climb you to try and get your muffin
- She is not very good at climbing so she will claw her way up your body
- It WILL hurt
- She WILL NOT give up
- She may try to eat the muffin right out of your mouth
- She is not allowed to eat muffins
You may pick her up / move her away if needed and if you’re really struggling, come and talk to us and we will help. No matter how much she wants to, it is still very important that you don’t let her eat any muffin as it will make her sick.
Good luck and we hope you enjoy your muffin experience!
She may look sweet and innocent but we promise you she’s not
/end image description]
Bea the muffin thief has come upon my timeline again and I am obliged to reblog.
Do you ever like physically feel yourself pass your mental breaking point and then all you can think is “oh these next few days are going to be interesting”
Like you’re just sitting there silently and on the outside you seem fine and gathered but in your head you’re like “oh this is gonna hit me like a train any second”
Glad to see all 19k of us are clearly fine and okay
Thess vs “Help Desks”
Sweet blessed gods, if people are going to try to phase out and or cheap out on phone helpdesk staff for the sake of their bottom line, they could at least do it competently. I’ve been using automated phone trees of one type or another for a long time, since the days when “hold the line while we transfer you to an operator” meant “some people are still using a rotary dial phone”, and it’s amazing to me how they get smarter and yet somehow more ridiculous every time I turn around.
There’s a thing I’ve been dealing with at the behest of my parentals regarding my state pension. Basically, over here, your state pension is based on your National Insurance contributions, and you have to have 35 years of full National Insurance contributions before you can get your full state pension. Thing is, because I worked as a temp a lot, there are a lot of years when I didn’t make a full contribution, and there weren’t National Insurance credits available for a lot of reasons. (It doesn’t help that I was allowed and in fact encouraged to use a temporary National Insurance number for years and it doesn’t look like those years count towards my state pension now, even though I paid above the odds those years. Ugh.) Now, theoretically, if everything goes to plan, I should be able to claim my full state pension because I’ve got fifteen years of full contributions as of this tax year and I’m not due to claim my state pension until 2044. Or later, because they might change the laws on that again; wouldn’t put it past the government as is. Anyway, point is, I should be fine. But it’s possible I won’t be fine, because I am, after all, disabled. Also, let’s face it - my luck with jobs has been made of dogshit for … well, most of my life, if you think about it. My luck’s holding so far but shit does happen, often, and often to me. So anyway, the point of all this is that you’re allowed to make voluntary contributions towards your state pension for the last five years that a full contribution wasn’t made. My parentals intend to make that voluntary contribution to take five years’ worth of pressure off my quest for a full state pension. Which is nice of them.
Now, if they just didn’t make it so damn complicated to give them money in that way, that’d be great.
They tell you to go to the website and follow the instructions to pay online or by direct debit. They don’t tell you that you need an 18-digit reference number until the box requesting one is staring you in the face. You actually have to go to ancillary information sources (non-HMRC help sites) just to find out how to get that 18-digit reference number they’re apparently so hot for. There are apparently two options for getting one: write to them and wait two weeks while they send one back by post, or call.
However, their automated voice-recognition phone tree piece of bullshit does not understand the difference between National Insurance reference number and National Insurance number. There is a difference. One you get given on a card so you can write it down on tax documents (like a social security number); the other is a very specific number used only by HMRC internally to deal with voluntary National Insurance contributions. However, the automated phone tree does not recognise this difference, so giving it the key phrase “National Insurance reference number” is useless. So is “voluntary National Insurance contributions”, and similar phrases. It’s not that the automated phone tree doesn’t understand it to a point; it just doesn’t recognise it as something I literally need to speak to a human being to sort out. Thus it just says, “Our lines are busy, look up the information online, good-bye”, and hangs up. No option to ask to speak to an advisor, nothing. Just “Check our website; bye. *clik*”
It took awhile, but I finally figured out how to actually speak with a human being in this instance. Every time it repeated the Google-perfect phrase I gave it and asked, “Is that correct?” … I said “no”. Even if it technically was. See, at that point, deliberately playing obtuse is the only way to go, and even then it was a nightmare. First they just let me try again - “Is this correct?” “No.” Then it suggested some key phrases I could give it as search terms. I picked one that sounded close-ish but no cigar - “Is this correct?” “No.” Then it gave me even simpler verbal options that really did sound like basic Google search terms - “Is this correct?” “No.” Finally, they gave me a number menu, and at the end of that list was “To speak to an advisor, press 4″. They went all the way around the houses to make it as hard as possible to speak to a human being, because every one of the options I was given in the first three tries were designed to point you at the website and hang up on you. I know because I tried them on and off for a fair bit of last week.
Then I spent over an hour on hold. I can’t blame them that much because we are coming on to tax season but especially when you consider how hard that phone tree works to shunt all callers to the website … fucking hell. All of that for an eventual conversation with a pleasant lady who asked a couple of questions, seemed grateful I had all the information she wanted to hand, and dealt with the whole thing in three minutes.
Don’t even get me started on the power company. On one hand, it’s a little easier to get to the “please hold for an advisor” stage. Not much, but a little. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure they outsource most if not all of their call center and web help staff overseas. Leaving aside the whole “You’re just outsourcing this work overseas so you can get a service while drastically underpaying your staff … more than you can get away with here, anyway” problem, the other issue there is that if you’re providing call centre services to a company that does business in an English-speaking country … it might be good if you at the very least made sure the staff providing the services can actually speak English to a reasonable degree. It’s hard to say that without worrying that I’m judging these people for not speaking English, but I swear I’m not judging. I don’t expect them to speak English because I’m fairly sure they’re not in England, or in any other country that speaks English as its first language, come to that. This is bad enough when it’s the web chat help system, where it’s pretty obvious that the person at the other end just copy-pasted your question into a FAQ search and then copy-pasted the result back to you without necessarily knowing what it said; it’s worse when it’s a human being and you need three tries for what effectively boils down to “I want to check my balance” but is a bit more complicated than that.
I’m sure that companies were wetting themselves in sheer joy when technology allowed for the automation of something vaguely resembling a help desk. Thing is, as my brother-from-another-mother says, computers are just very fast idiots. They will do exactly what you tell them, and only exactly what you tell them, and if your request deviates even a little from their parameters of what a request looks like, they will throw a fit. As for outsourcing overseas … like I said, I don’t blame the people on the other end of the phone or web chat who don’t speak English very well. I blame the people who hire them on at ludicrously low pay and horrific hours and then setting them up for hours of abuse from customers who are a lot less polite than I am about their understandable inability to speak fluent English when they live in a country that doesn’t.
I think this pisses me off to a greater degree than usual these days because of a certain piece of rhetoric regarding jobs and people in this country doing them since the fucking Brexit referendum. They yell about “foreigners taking our jobs” while throwing ones that would actually be perfect for people in this country on a work-from-home basis - for the disabled, carers for small children or vulnerable adults, even for second jobs that wouldn’t require even more time spent on commuting - at places with fewer employment rights and minimum wage laws, which only results in a worse service and more stressed staff. If the xenophobes in this country don’t want “foreigners taking our jobs”, maybe they should demand that we stop throwing ‘our jobs’ at ‘foreigners’ in a massively exploitative model that does nothing but fatten the profit margins of the CEOs. And also maybe don’t throw it at computers that require a certain specificity to function in a helpful way, when help desks are generally called by people who don’t have specifics - THAT IS WHY THEY ARE CALLING FOR HELP.
I mean, I think a lot of this boils down to “stop using technology to exploit people in the name of The Great God ECONOMY, you shitheads”, but with specific examples and a lot of frustration.
sometimes people try to tell me that scientists are paragons of rationality and I have to break it to them that I have yet to work in a lab that didn’t have at least one weird secret shrine in it
new guy: why is all of the equipment in this room covered in toys?
me: dONn’t touch those
new guy:
me: they need the toys to function. if they don’t all have toys they get jealous.
new guy:
new guy:
me: when something breaks just take the wizard and wave it around for a while. they seem to like that.
Science is rational, scientists are human.
In Taiwan we have a special brand of snacks named 乖乖 (literally means “well behaved” but in a casual way like when one’s compliment a child or a pet of being good) that has green package.
It has become the lucky charm in the IT industry because engineers believe it will make machine acting good (like the name of the snack) and stay in green light (like the color of the snack’s package) when a 乖乖 is put on top of a server.
It is the only food allowed in a server room and the biggest semicondoctor company in Taiwan (which is also the biggest worldwide) even commissioned the snack factory to make a customized version with blessing on the package.
This is how a server room is blessed by 乖乖. You put at least one on top of each server. It’s important that the engineers change them before the expire date because legend says the snack looses it’s power after expire date.
You’ll hear engineers swearing up and down that their server room
crushed down the one time they forgot to change the snack. Or some
newbie ate the forbidden snack put on top of their server and caused a
disastrous crush down.
The 乖乖 religion later spread to all people who want their machine to act nice. In the lab we put 乖乖 on ultra-low freezer (you really don’t want it to drop dead along with your 2 years’ worth of sample/data), mass
spectrometer etc.
When Taiwan’s about to launch the first self made satellite in 2017, the develop team even put 乖乖 around the satellite model to prey for a successful launch (it did). This shit is real.
Broke: Humans are inherently good
Broke: Humans are inherently evil
Woke: Humans are, for good or evil, inherently ridiculous
you know what really grinds my gears?
okay, bear with me: so as you may know, harry houdini and arthur conan doyle were friends, at least for a while.
by the early 1920s, both arthur conan doyle and acd's wife jean, aka lady doyle, believed whole-heartedly in spiritualism, talking to ghosts and all of that. (sidenote: this was of course right on the heels of a devastating world war and a devastating pandemic, both of which had created a huge population of grieving people, so spiritualism was having a moment.)
lady doyle sincerely thought she had the ability to go into a trance state and pass along messages in writing from the dead. she offered to do this for houdini. houdini agreed.
lady doyle attempted to channel houdini's late mother. she basically drew a cross at the top of the paper and filled it with generic platitudes addressed to "harry." houdini's mom was jewish and didn't talk like that, so houdini knew the jig was up, even if lady doyle didn't. but not wanting to make the situation awkward, he kind of went along with it to their faces.
then acd decided to publish a glowing account of the seance, and since both he and houdini were super famous, it got a lot of attention, and letters started pouring in for houdini, asking if this was true. ultimately, houdini couldn't life about it. so he essentially said, like, "yeah, i think lady doyle THINKS she can talk to ghosts but she absolutely can't." and it ruined his friendship with acd forever.
and then of course a lot of the people running seances weren't even well-intentioned like lady doyle, they were just simple charlatans taking advantage of traumatized people mourning loved ones. in houdini's youth, he and his wife had traveled the carnival circuit where he did an act pretending to commune with spirits, so he knew all the tricks of the trade AND he had lingering guilt over having done this, AND he was infuriated by this increasingly popular wave of con artists so he decided to assemble a team of anti-grifting grifters and together they went on the road exposing whichever spiritualists were preying on the locals.
houdini's best agent was a young woman named rose mackenberg, who donned disguises to visit the fraud de jour and then importantly sussed out what non-supernatural thing was actually happening, and then houdini would demonstrate the techniques onstage to packed audiences.
(if you want to know more, check out episode 175, "ghost racket crusade" of the podcast Criminal or read Tony Wolf's book The Real-Life Ghostbusting Adventures of Rose Mackenberg.)
but yeah, what really gets my goat is that all this happened and as far as i know, we still don't have like four seasons of a Leverage-style historical procedural about rose mackenberg and the rest of the crew having adventures in the 1920s as they unmask craven hucksters all over the united states. (what we do have, apparently, is one season of a show called "houdini and doyle" which is about the oddball friendship of two contrasting men solving sometimes-actually-supernatural mysteries, and whose premise does i think at the very least a real disservice to houdini's whole quest and also totally erases rose, who is arguably the most interesting part of this story to me.)
i am just steamed about this. steamed.
Anonymous asked:
As a Taylor Swift expert, Gaylor hater, and recovering 1989er, you probably don't want to know that apparently in the notes of the re-recording Taylor Swift talks about how she wasn't dating any of her female friends, and the Gaylors are having meltdowns on twitter. Words like "gaslit" and "queerbaiting" are being used.
batmanisagatewaydrug answered:
of COURSE I want to know about that, I need to go log back into my twitter account RIGHT NOW
also goddddd as a certified 1989 enjoyer I’m gonna have to listen to Taylor’s Version :/
oh damn the girlies are NOT taking this well
sorry I'm so sorry this is the funniest thing that has EVER happened
our homegrown tumblr gaylors are also going through it btw
Holy fuck.
People literally getting ANGRY AT HER for daring to mention she's STRAIGHT. It's personally offending her marginalized fans for her to not go along with their desperation for HER to be Queer.
... Me, I'm a P!nk fan, I have no idea what this is about. Delighted not to be Le Involved here.
You left the best part in the tags!
Wow what a coincidence @booksandfiltercoffee was just telling me about gaylor panic in the streets of social media.
That was brought upon by this post
I especially love that Tumblr screenshot saying "if what you're implying is the truth, just SAY IT" because she has! She's stated over and over again "I am not gay, I am straight, I am heterosexual" and they REFUSED to believe her and blamed it on compulsory heterosexuality, or her being too scared to come out. She LITERALLY did just say it!
yarnaddiction