robot-lover extraordinaire

our friend's daughter is at the age where she is extremely chatty and speaking in full sentences, and i love kids' use of language.

apparently all strangers used to be "ladies," but now they are "neighbors." since they speak english exclusively at home, "neighbors" speak german; it was very distressing to hear her mom speak german once, because, in her words, "you're not a doctor or a neighbor!"

When learning how to talk, each one of my 3 sons went through a phase where I was the only person they said "She" for. Obviously, SHE was Mom, and HE was the rest of the world

Three sons, and I was the only female in the household (dog was male too).

i love the idea of a mode of language where the human noun classification system is “one’s own mother” and “everyone else”

Was also thinking about Hardison as a friendly well-adjusted hacker and he should’ve gotten to call in the help of internet friends more. Maybe he did and I’m forgetting, but every time Eliot went “I know a guy… we worked together in [insert foreign country], deep cover paramilitary stuff”, Hardison should’ve gone “I also know a guy, from my twitch stream”

You're right and you should say it.

My favorite thing about the Leverage fandom is that we took the Characterfirstname Serieslastname thing to heart so strongly with Parker. No picking out a surname with flimsy reasoning from Canon, no calling her by Archie's last name because he's the closest thing to a dad she had as a kid, or Nate's because he's the best dad she had, or Hardison's because he's her romantic partner and they're BASICALLY married right.

Parker's name is Parker Leverage. Signed and notarized, fandom approved.

my favorite thing about this concept is that they made leverage a last name (Harlan leverage III for old nate and all that) so it is ENTIRELY POSSIBLE that when Parker absolutely needs a last name she would use Leverage as said last name and I think that's beautiful

YOU PEOPLE WERE SCANNING RANDOM QR CODES?

Could I interest you in this usb stick I found on the pavement

if you have Norton Antivirus or Norton VPN, delete the software ASAP.

Norton is automatically installing and running a cryptocurrency mining program in the backgrounds of their users. There is no text box asking to confirm the use of this program and is installed automatically, it runs during “downtime” on your computer . While the official announcement said that this program was exclusive to the US, international users are reporting it as well. We don’t know the exact scope yet.

To delete this program, must go into the files (Program Files/Norton) and delete the file NCrypt.exe. It will ask for the admin permission. (Some report having admin permissions on their computer but being unable to delete the program.) If the software is already downloaded to your computer, I would NOT recommend continuing to use Norton, as there is no guarantee that the .exe file won’t return in another update.

Tell your friends and family, reblog, spread this, please. It’s barely been getting any attention, and I worry that Norton is setting a precedent that other companies will repeat. However, if a large (or very vocal) part of the userbase continues to complain, it may make Norton or other companies think twice before mining crypto on your computer.

Confirmed on Norton's website 1/4/22.

This was trialed in their early access program in June of last year, and is now included with all subscriptions.

Don't want to mine cryptocurrency? You should use a different antivirus.

Windows Defender is actually pretty good last I checked.

...UGH. :/

Daydreaming of the alternate reality in which Yahoo successfully acquired Google in 1998 and Facebook in 2006, thereby destroying both companies due to their incompetence and ultimately saving the internet.

ok. that part in the scheherazade job where hardison is looking at the strad for the first time with pure wonder in his eyes. and almost drops his accent when he says in that awed voice how technology has never been able to replicate the sound of a stradivarius. im going to cry

#leverage#not to wax poetic about the use of character tropes in leverage AGAIN#but i just…i LOVE THAT MOMENT for hardison#because it shows that someone put more than a few minutes of surface level thought into this character#into WHAT MAKES A GEEK A GEEK#because like…in a less good show hardison wouldn’t have acknowledged that moment with the stradivarius#hardison’s character wouldn’t have been so full of overflowing JOY at nerdy things#rather hardison would have been the kind of superficial ‘plotconveniencetonium’ character that writers create#when they need a ‘super smart’ science type to provide everything the team needs#but don’t want to put a whole lot of thought into#hardison on a less good show would have been a walking talking encyclopedia - just like he is! - but without any joy behind him#a character who took pleasure only in the minutiae of his knowledge and maybe in some conscious or unconscious gatekeeping for flair#hardison on a less good show when confronted with the stradivarius#would have gone on a five minute rant about repeated vibration patterns in aged wood and the exact technique stradivarius used#before a ‘cooler’ character shut him down with an eye roll#but INSTEAD we get alec hardison standing in front of something old and fragile and beautiful#and saying in an overjoyed and reverent voice ‘my field has never been able to do better than this#no one understands why - including me’#Y'ALL - WE LOVE A STEM GEEK WHO WALTZES WITH THE HUMANITIES. WE LOVE AN ALEC HARDISON#who can not only masterfully forge and mimic historical masterpieces with rigid scientific precision#but who QUALITATIVELY APPRECIATES SAID MASTERPIECES FOR THE SAKE OF THE ART i will weep (@takiki16)

Tread here.

The best part is OP got fired because their boss asked why they weren’t “incorporating blockchain technology” into the video switcher they were building and OP straight up said “you have no idea what you’re talking about” and went to lunch

found this and i think it's the perfect character meme

I’m playing a relatively new game and it’s still a little buggy so whenever there’s a glitch or something the devs want you to email them about it. So my game crashed and deleted my save file and when I sent the devs an email about it I got this back:

So I’m on AO3 and I see a lot of people who put “I do not own [insert fandom here]” before their story.

Like, I came on this site to read FAN fiction. This is a FAN fiction site. I’m fully aware that you don’t own the fandom or the characters. That’s why it’s called FAN FICTION.

Oh you youngins… How quickly they forget.

Back in the day, before fan fiction was mainstream and even encouraged by creators… This was your “please don’t sue me, I’m poor and just here for a good time” plea.

Cause guess what? That shit used to happen.

how soon they forget ann rice’s lawyers.

What happened with her lawyers.

History became legend. Legend became myth….  And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.

I worked with one of the women that got contacted by Rice’s lawyers. Scared the hell out of her and she never touched fandom again. The first time I saw a commission post on tumblr for fanart, I was shocked.

One of the reasons I fell out of love with her writing was her treatment of the fans… (that and the opening chapter of Lasher gave me such heebie-jeebies with the whole underage sex thing I felt unclean just reading it.)

I have zero problem with fanart/fic so long as the creators aren’t making money off of it. It is someone else’s intellectual property and people who create fan related works need to respect that (and a solid 98% of them do.)

The remaining 2% are either easily swayed by being gently prompted to not cash in on someone else’s IP. Or they DGAF… and they are the ones who will eventually land themselves in hot water. Either way: this isn’t much of an excuse to persecute your entire fanbase.

But Anne Rice went off the deep end with this stuff by actively attacking people who were expressing their love for her work and were not profiteering from it.

The Vampire Chronicles was a dangerous fandom to be in back in the day. Most of the works I read/saw were hidden away in the dark recesses of the internet and covered by disclaimers (a lot of them reading like thoroughly researched legal documents.)

And woe betide anyone who was into shipping anyone with ANYONE in that fandom. You were most at risk, it seemed, if your vision of the characters deviated from the creators ‘original intentions.’ (Hypocritical of a woman who made most of her living writing erotica.)

Imagine getting sued over a headcanon…

Put simply: we all lived in fear of her team of highly paid lawyers descending from the heavens and taking us to court over a slashfic less than 500 words long.

all of this

Reblogging because I can’t believe there are people out there who don’t know the story behind fan fiction disclaimers. 

Yep I used to have disclaimers on all my Buffy fic back in the day. The Buffy creators were mostly pretty chill about fandom but it’s not like it is now. You did NOT talk about fandom with anyone except other fandom people and bringing it up at cons was a massive no no because of stuff like this.

I think Supernatural (and Misha Collins specifically) was when that wall between fandom and creators started to break down. It’s a relatively new thing.

I remember going to a Merlin panel down in London and a girl sitting next to me asked the cast about slash and I thought she was going to get kicked out!

Fandom history is important.

Oh, this brings back some not so-awesome ‘90s fandom memories! 

Oh man, let me tell you about the X-Files fandom. Lawyers for FOX sued, threatened, and generally terrified the owners of fan websites on a regular basis. God help you if you wrote or created original art set in their (expansive) universe or worse - dared to write about their characters. Even people who weren’t creating fanworks, just hosting Geocities pages about how much people liked the show would be sent C&D orders or actually fined. When I was first discovering the concept, the first rule of fandom was you do not talk about fandom because the consequences could be devastating.

It was such a strange and uncomfortable experience for me when fans in LOTR and Potter fandoms suddenly started shoving their work in people’s faces speaking publicly about fandom and wanting to engage in dialogue with the creators and actors of the Thing they were into. Fan stuff was supposed to stay online, in archives and list-serves and zines we passed around because it just wasn’t cool to talk about it and it could get you in a boatload of trouble. The freedom we have to create and gather together in a shared space, or actually be acknowledged in any way by people outside the fandom was inconceivable to my fannish, teenaged self. I want fans these days to understand how amazing modern fandom really is, cherish the community, and appreciate what it took to get us here. 

“if you found this by googling yourself, hit back now. this means you, pete wentz”

Oh hey, even more blasts from the past.

I was one of the ones who got a love letter from Anne Rice’s lawyers. Bear in mind that up until that point her publisher had encouraged fanfic and worked with the archive keeper (one of my roommates at the time) to drum up publicity for upcoming books and so on.

I could tell such tales of how much Anne screwed over her fans back then. The tl;dr version is that she and her peeps would use fan projects as free market research and then bring in the lawyers once it was felt Anne could make money off of it herself. (Talismanic Tours being one of the most offensive examples of this.)

But where fanfic is concerned not only did we get nastygrams but one of my friends had Anne’s lawyer trying to fuck up her own privately owned business which had NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING ANNE RELATED. Said friend was a small business owner with health issues who wasn’t exactly rolling in money, so guess how well that went?

On top of that when yours truly tried to speak out about it I discovered that someone in Anne’s camp had been cyber stalking me to the point where they took all the tiny crumbs of personal information I had posted over the course of five years or so and used it to doxx me (before that was even a term and in early enough days of the WWW that this wasn’t an easy task) and post VERY personal information about me on the main fandom message board of the time. Luckily for me the mod was my friend and she took that down post haste, but it was still oodles of fun feeling that violated and why to this day I am very strict about keeping my fandom and personal lives separate online.

Hence why those of us in the fandom at the time who still gave enough of a shit to want to keep writing fic DID keep writing fic, but shoved it so far underground and slapped it with so many disclaimers they could’ve outweighed the word count of War & Peace. It wasn’t just for the purpose of protecting fic but for trying to protect our personal lives as well.

(Also would love to know who @tiger-in-the-flightdeck knew. Life paths crossing after so many years….)

Lucasfilm also sent cease-and-desist letters to Star Wars fanzines publishing slash.

My favourite bit I read from one included the idea that you weren’t allowed to have any explicit content, of which anything queer, no matter how tame, was included, to “preserve that innocence even Imperial crew members must be imagined to have”.

Yeah. The same Imperial crew members who helped build the Death Star to commit planetary genocide.

(It’s one reason Sinjir Velus, while I still have some issues with him, feels like such a delicious ‘f*** you’.)

Later on, they were apparently persuaded to ‘allow’ fans to write slash, provided in ‘remained within the nebulous bounds of good taste’.

(On a related note, if I wasn’t quite so attached to my URL, I would 100% change it to ‘Nebulous Bounds’, because that’s just downright catchy)

GRRM also publicly decries fanfics and fanficcers. Most of book ASoIaF fandom was secretive and locked (on lj, where GRRM is on) for fear of legal consequences before the TV show.

I remember idolizing a pair of X-Files fanfic authors back in the day (you know who you are) because it was SO DARING that they would put “fucking try and sue me you rat bastards” on their fics instead of disclaimers.  Like I was honestly afraid for them.

Two Frantic ‘NCIS’ Characters Try to Stop a Hacker by Implausibly Typing on the Keyboard at the Same Time

Facebook engineers yesterday

IIRC correctly the writers admitted that they wrote this scene because they were tired of all the criticism that their hacking scenes weren’t 100% accurate, and/or included visual elements like a GUI instead of just command lines, so they decided to have an unofficial internal contest about who could make the tech scenes more and more ridiculous, continuing to ramp it up until we got to this specific moment - the peak of bullshit mountain. 

One view of the internet that I find important is that it’s an amoral ecosystem of ideas, many of which are poisonous to you and can have effects ranging from ‘making you waste your day angry at someone’ to ‘causing you join to a cultish crusade for or against some political ideology that renders you incompatible with large swathes of mainstream society’. If you are a very online person, you cannot just take content as you go, otherwise the hungriest and most efficient predators will snap you up and consume huge amounts of your mental resources. If you are Very Online, the internet will radicalize you by default.

The fact of radicalization is neutral. Certainly there’s nothing guaranteed to be good about the things you already believe and the ways you act; there are extreme-relative-to-society viewpoints and movements floating around that will, in my view, make you a better person. But the majority will not, just because there are more bad things than good things, more incorrect things than correct ones. There’s nothing that says morally righteous movements (or the ones that will make you more thoughtful and happy) are more memetically powerful and good at capturing the imagination and belief system than the immoral (or bad-for-you-personally).

If you read an unusual claim online, there are two equally important questions to ask about it – the first, of course, is “is this correct?”, and the second is “if I take this seriously, and become the kind of person who believes it, how will it change my life? Do I accept that?”

The salmonella onion ban has informed me that about 50% of my mutuals had a nice soup planned that's just RUINED now.

sorry the what now?

This is per the CDC, read any stickers they might have on them!

"ProSource said in the recall that the onions were "distributed to wholesalers, broadline foodservice customers, and retail stores" in mesh sacks ranging from 2 to 50 pounds and cartons ranging from 5 to 50 pounds "by the following distributors and/or under the following brands: Big Bull, Peak Fresh Produce, Sierra Madre, Markon First Crop., Markon Essentials, Rio Blue, ProSource, Rio Valley, and Sysco Imperial."

To date, this outbreak has been associated with 652 illness, 129 hospitalizations and no deaths spanning the following states: AL, AR, CA, CO, CT, FL, GA, IA, IL, IN, KS, KY, LA, MA, MD, MI, MN, MO, MS, NC, ND, NE, NJ, NM, NY, OH, OK, OR, PA, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, WI, WV.

@markwatneythespacepirate umm

IT WASNT THE GARLIC WOOOOOOO sorry i should be more sensitive to everyone suffering but yooooooooooooooo i can still eat alliums!!

...dammit. all my sauces :(

The salmonella onion ban has informed me that about 50% of my mutuals had a nice soup planned that's just RUINED now.

sorry the what now?

This is per the CDC, read any stickers they might have on them!

"ProSource said in the recall that the onions were "distributed to wholesalers, broadline foodservice customers, and retail stores" in mesh sacks ranging from 2 to 50 pounds and cartons ranging from 5 to 50 pounds "by the following distributors and/or under the following brands: Big Bull, Peak Fresh Produce, Sierra Madre, Markon First Crop., Markon Essentials, Rio Blue, ProSource, Rio Valley, and Sysco Imperial."

To date, this outbreak has been associated with 652 illness, 129 hospitalizations and no deaths spanning the following states: AL, AR, CA, CO, CT, FL, GA, IA, IL, IN, KS, KY, LA, MA, MD, MI, MN, MO, MS, NC, ND, NE, NJ, NM, NY, OH, OK, OR, PA, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, WI, WV.

@markwatneythespacepirate umm

IT WASNT THE GARLIC WOOOOOOO sorry i should be more sensitive to everyone suffering but yooooooooooooooo i can still eat alliums!!

Thinking about that time Parker panicked and gave ‘Hardison’ as her fake name… thinking about the ot3 using one another’s names as aliases because they’ll always react to hearing any of their names. Thinking about the ot3 using each other’s names in their aliases to signal to one another. Hardison gets made and bluffs, confidently introduces himself as “Eliot Parker”, knowing without needing to check or say anything else that the two of them will be there for him in minutes. Parker gives her name as ‘Elle Spencer’ because they were bickering in the van on the way over about whether Eliot liked being called El or not and she wants to prove to him it’s a good name. One time Hardison gives the name ‘Alec Spencer’, and after it all goes sideways, when they’ve dragged him out of another stupid near-death situation because some stupid rich mark got squirrely, while he’s leaning against Eliot’s shoulder in the back of the van trying to recover his breath and pretending not to notice how hard Eliot is clinging to him, Eliot manages to choke out “If you want to take my name, you gotta propose first”.

hardison, sweating, thinking about the rings hidden in his no-parker safe: …..haha yeah