My adaptation of the God of Arepo short story, which was originally up at ShortBox Comics Fair for charity. You can get a copy of the DRM-free ebook here for free - and I'd encourage you to donate to Mighty Writers or The Ministry of Stories in exchange.

Again it's an honour to be drawing one of my favourite short stories ever. Thank you so much for the original authors for creating this story; and for everyone who bought a copy and donated to the above non-profits.

wow you got to the red stop light faster and more dangerously than anyone else. should we throw a party?? should we call nascar

Accidentally wound up on "hear me out cake" tiktok, and I swear, if another one of these bitches puts down an at-most-unconventionally-attractive human man, Lady Dimitrescu or Nick Wilde/Robin Hood I am going to lose my fucking mind.

Saw one where the first person they named was Disney's Aladdin and I tapped out so hard I entered a fugue state and didn't regain full consciousness for like a solid hour.

Girlies giggling and gasping because they said their 'hear me out' was Gill from Finding Nemo, like

I'm so sorry, babygirl, but that's a hot fish. I know you thought you were being so controversial, but that is one of the most fuckable cartoon fish in existence. This is weaksauce.

String identified: Accta "a t ca" tt, a a, at t tc t a at-t-cta-attact a a, a tc c / a gg t cg . a t t t a a ' Aa a ta t a t a g tat a 't ga cc a . G gggg a gag ca t a t 'a t' a G g , ' , ag, t tat' a t . tgt g cta, t tat t t ca cat tc. T aac.

Closest match: Biomphalaria glabrata genome assembly, chromosome: 11

(image source)

please do not the snail.

please do not the me.

netflix subtitles are great for when you want to read a caption with like 50% resemblance to what's being spoken

character in a movie: buddy, i'm gonna tell you what i've got to do

netflix subtitles: i'll say what i must do

character in a movie: *exhales*

netflix subtitles: (blows raspberry)

character in a movie: ciao!

netflix subtitles: (in italian) bye!

*character in a movie: ciao!

netflix subtitles: (speaks foreign language)

IF YOU LIVE IN THE USA

THIS IS ILLEGAL

REPORT THEM TO THE FCC

THEY HAVE A LINK ON THEIR WEBSITE TO RWPORT IT

ITS REQUIRED BY THE ADA THAT SUBTITLES EXACTLY MATCH THE DIALOGUE

i reported basically every Star Trek show on Paramount+ because the subtitles were all fucked up. they sent me auto emails to let me know they were working on it, and then a real life human being got in touch with me after they had fixed it, to ask if i was still experiencing the issue. they WILL do something, they are required by FEDERAL LAW to do something.

Magic the Gathering tip: keep living. hug your friends.

@wearepaladin

my humble review of disco elysium

Who wants to come with me to New Jersey to go on an exciting adventure to find the magical mystery baseball mud

POWERFUL American Potion Ingredient: Secret New Jersey Baseball Mud

so i spent far too long on this.

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.

#they have baggage

DEEP CLEAN

DEEP CLEAN

There is this medieval book with the recipe to make rats

And the recipe is basically something like: left a bag of grain alone in a dark basement for a week, after a week you will enter and have rats.

Spontaneous generation is great