The great thing about fandom/internet friends vs. friends you meet out IRL, is that when you get to know people for the first time face-to-face, there’s this awkward process of trying to figure out juuuust how much of a dork they are, and how much you can nerd out before you scare them off. Like, you don’t wanna break out the real freaky shit right off. There’s always the impulse to hang back a little, as you try to gauge just how into a thing they are. But with fandom friends? You fucking met them in the garbage heap. You knew their fucked up narrative kinks before you even know their real name. They are screaming their passions into the void. Your friendship comes pre-loaded with already knowing the exact depths of each other’s depravity, and any ordinary-people-shit you have in common is just a bonus.
[id: gif from the Les Mis movie of Javert’s line “I was born with scum like you, I am from the gutter too” complete with fantastically exaggerated facial expression]
facebook reminded me that today a few years back, august 2nd 2012, i met a time traveler
dude wearing extremely stereotypical hipster gear (plaid scarf, cut-off jeans, vest over ironic tee, fedora) but looked about 35ish.
he walked up to me, this was in 2012 when i ascribed to my assigned gender and was very clearly dressed in a feminine way with my hair all done up and heavy makeup and girly clothes, and he said “excuse me sir are you good with your history?”
he punctuates the sentence by showing me a little silver spoon with the new york skyline on it. i decide against correcting him.
having JUST graduated high school, i said “kinda”
he nods and says a little quietly “when was it that the.. erm..” he struggles for a second, then recognition lights up his eyes. “ah, the two towers collapsed?”
i’m jolted by the bus coming to a stop. i blink a few times and say “september 11th. 2001.”
he says “right. of course. thank you.” and immediately gets off the bus.
Our bard, hurriedly rolling with one hand and holding a ringing phone in the other, talking 100mph: “I poke the cultist with the hurty end of my rapier, that hits, that’s eight damage, excuseme excuseme excusemee”
Our bard, standing up from the table and answering her phone: “HEYYY what’s uuup I just stabbed a maaan!“
This post is going to rushed but I’m still shaking and it’s hard to type but I NEED people to know this
My mom just took my dog to the vet
She(my dog) was(still is?) having a seizure
Last month we took my dog to the vet and they told us she had developed diabetes, they told us it was caused by the food she was eating, purina beneful.
They told us that there have been many many many reports of Beneful has been causing diabetes, seizures, and even death in dogs.
We had no idea
We immediately switched her food and put her on a special diet plan for her diabetes, unfortunately the effects were already permeate.
Today at 11:20 my mom woke me up crying, I helped her carry my dog to the car (while she was still having a seizure) and watched her drive away red faced and still crying.
Please please PLEASE if you are feeding your pets Purina beneful PLEASE switch their food ASAP
Beneful is poising dogs and I don’t want anyone else to experience what I just did
Also if you could please help me signal boost this so everyone can know
This would explain why my dog has seizures now…fucking hell
Reblog and save lives of dogs
found out purina was the reason my dog winston had been having seizures and puking. please don’t feed your dog purina.
reblog even if you don’t own a dog or even if you’re not “a dog person” because I can’t even imagine how horribly depressed I would be if this happened to my dog
When I first saw this post months ago we IMMEDIATELY switched, please please take care of your fur babies
But guess what? There’s something you didn’t know about the vote.
Get this: the vote was basically illegal.
You heard me right. Eric Schneiderman, American lawyer, said in Twitter: “I will sue to stop the FCC’s illegal rollback of #netneutrality. New Yorkers and all Americans deserve a free and open internet.”
Not only do we have another ally, but now we know that the vote wasn’t supposed to happen.
We’ve got this. Now the REAL FIGHT starts now.
And wasn’t suppose to happen because
There was no research committee. Pai pulled “facts” out of his ass and will now have to defend his “evidence” in court.
There was a “voter fraud” in that many of the comments for the repeal was made by stealing people’s online identities. Pai could also be charged with identity theft.
They blatantly ignored the millions of Americans who wanted to save net neutrality and yes the FCC is beholden to the people even if they aren’t elected officials.
There’s a very very good chance Pai and the other three members who voted for the repeal are in the pocket of some of the larger corporations like Verizon and AT&T and could be charged with bribery if the case is dragged out long enough and they’re finances are investigated.
Not just identity theft. Mass fraud, too.
I know for a fact that some of the fraudulent names came from various sources: pro-NN persons, non-existent names, emails that were backtracked to Russia…Gods sakes, even names of the dead were used!
These are felonies. Justice is demanded for these crimes.
For the Net neutrality and for the reasons, we must keep fighting.
Oh that remind me…
For those of you that either question or disbelieve the validity of AG Schneiderman’s claims of this being illegal…I come with proof, straight from the source.
here’s a reminder that if you aren’t eating properly, you aren’t thinking properly. you won’t be able to control your intrusive thoughts. your emotions will overtake you. you won’t be able to verbalize how you feel, which will frustrate you even more. until you’re nourished and healthy again, your illness will continue to take hold. the only way out is to eat.
I used to work for a call center and I was doing a political survey and I called this number that was randomly generated for me and the way our system worked was voice-activated so when the other person said hello you’d get connected to them, so I just launch right into my “Harvard University and NPR blah blah blah” thing and then there’s this long pause and I think the person’s hung up even though I didn’t hear a click
And then I hear “you shouldn’t be able to call this number.”
So I apologize and go into the preset spiel about because we aren’t selling anything, etc. etc. and the answer I get is
“No, I know that. What I mean is that it should be impossible for you to call this number, and I need to know how you got it.”
I explain that it’s randomly generated and I’m very sorry for bothering him, and go to hang up. And before I can click terminate, I hear:
“Ma’am, this is a matter of national security.”
I accidentally called the director of the FBI.
My job got investigated because a computer randomly spit out a number to the Pentagon.
This is my new favourite story.
When I was in college I got a job working for a company that manages major air-travel data. It was a temp gig working their out of date system while they moved over to a new one, since my knowing MS Dos apparently made me qualified.
There was no MS Dos involved. Instead, there was a proprietary type-based OS and an actually-uses-transistors refrigerator-sized computer with switches I had to trip at certain times during the night as I watched the data flow from six pm to six AM on Fridays and weekends. If things got stuck, I reset the server.
The company handled everything from low-end data (hotel and car reservations) to flight plans and tower information. I was weighed every time I came in to make sure it was me. Areas of the building had retina scanners on doors.
During training. they took us through all the procedures. Including the procedures for the red phone. There was, literally, a red phone on the shelf above my desk. “This is a holdover from the cold war.” They said. “It isn’t going to come up, but here’s the deal. In case of nuclear war or other nation-wide disaster, the phone will ring. Pick up the phone, state your name and station, and await instructions. Do whatever you are told.”
So my third night there, it’s around 2am and there’s a ringing sound.
I look up, slowly. The Red phone is ringing.
So I reach out, I pick up the phone. I give my name and station number. And I hear every station head in the building do the exact same. One after another, voices giving names and numbers. Then silence for the space of two breaths. Silence broken by…
“Uh… Is Shantavia there?”
It turns out that every toll free, 1-900 or priority number has a corresponding local number that it routs to at its actual destination. Some poor teenage girl was trying to dial a friend of hers, mixed up the numbers, and got the atomic attack alert line for a major air-travel corporation’s command center in the mid-west United States.
There’s another pause, and the guys over in the main data room are cracking up. The overnight site head is saying “I think you have the wrong number, ma’am.” and I’m standing there having faced the specter of nuclear annihilation before I was old enough to legally drink.
The red phone never rang again while I was there, so the people doing my training were only slightly wrong in their estimation of how often the doomsday phone would ring.
Every time I try to find this story, I end up having to search google with a variety of terms that I’m sure have gotten me flagged by some watchlist, so I’m reblogging it again where I swear I’ve reblogged it before.
But none of these stories even come close to the best one of them all; a wrong number is how the NORAD Santa Tracker got started.
Seriously, this is legit.
In December 1955, Sears decided to run a Santa hotline. Here’s the ad they posted.
Only problem is, they misprinted the number. And the number they printed? It went straight through to fucking NORAD. This was in the middle of the Cold War, when early warning radar was the only thing keeping nuclear annihilation at bay. NORAD was the front line.
And it wasn’t just any number at NORAD. Oh no no no.
Terri remembers her dad had two phones on his desk, including a red
one. “Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the
number,” she says.
“This was the ‘50s, this was the Cold War,
and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on
the United States,” Rick says.
The red phone rang one day in
December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. “And then there was a
small voice that just asked, ‘Is this Santa Claus?’ ”
His
children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was
annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then,
Terri says, the little voice started crying.
“And Dad realized
that it wasn’t a joke,” her sister says. “So he talked to him,
ho-ho-ho’d and asked if he had been a good boy and, ‘May I talk to your
mother?’ And the mother got on and said, ‘You haven’t seen the paper
yet? There’s a phone number to call Santa. It’s in the Sears ad.’ Dad
looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had
children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the
phones to act like Santa Claus.”
“It got to be a big joke at the command center. You
know, ‘The old man’s really flipped his lid this time. We’re answering
Santa calls,’ ” Terri says.
And then, it got better.
“The airmen had this big glass board with the United States on it and
Canada, and when airplanes would come in they would track them,” Pam
says.
“And Christmas Eve of 1955, when Dad walked in, there was
a drawing of a sleigh with eight reindeer coming over the North Pole,”
Rick says.
“Dad said, ‘What is that?’ They say, ‘Colonel, we’re
sorry. We were just making a joke. Do you want us to take that down?’
Dad looked at it for a while, and next thing you know, Dad had called
the radio station and had said, ‘This is the commander at the Combat
Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks
like a sleigh.’ Well, the radio stations would call him like every hour
and say, ‘Where’s Santa now?’ ” Terri says.
For real.
“And later in life he got letters from all over the world, people
saying, ‘Thank you, Colonel,’ for having, you know, this sense of humor.
And in his 90s, he would carry those letters around with him in a
briefcase that had a lock on it like it was top-secret information,” she
says. “You know, he was an important guy, but this is the thing he’s
known for.”
“Yeah,” Rick [his son] says, “it’s probably the thing he was proudest of, too.”
So yeah. I think that might be the best wrong number of all time.
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