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Hey so fun new scam just dropped! I got a call earlier today from someone spoofing the local police department's desk number, asking me if there was a reason I'd missed my jury summons this morning.

Friends, I had not received a jury summons for this month. Which I told him, at which point his previously clear diction suddenly turned into a rapid mumble, only becoming clear for scary words like 'federal' and then asking to confirm my address, at which point I hung up and decided to call the police department later.

When I called the police department the desk officer sounded so tired y'all. All I had to say was "Hey I got a call earlier saying I missed jury duty this morning?" and she immediately sighed and told me that yes it was a scam that was going around and thanked me for calling to confirm.

So this is your periodic reminder that law enforcement agencies will not call you to tell you that you're in trouble. If you need to pay a fine of some sort they will mail you a physical invoice. Anyone calling you saying they're from the police or any other law enforcement organization (up to the CIA and yes I have heard of scammers attempting to impersonate CIA agents over the phone) who then tries to get financial information from you over the phone is a scammer.

I know I actually bang on about this a weird amount, but it is my fervent hope that the information will stick in peoples' brains if they get randomly selected for the adrenaline spike lottery. Scammers use scary words to get you to panic in order to shut down your critical thinking, and if even one person's brain spits out "Tumblr user waterhobbit said the cops/CIA/federal marshalls don't call about this shit" before their bank account routing number is in the hands of assholes I will consider it a job well done.

The person in this post follows my rule of thumb that protects me from 99.9% of all phone scams, and i'd like to highlight it here

For ANY "important" call you actually think might be real, get the name of the agency or institution involved, (and here is the important part:) look up the phone number to that agency or institution on your own, and call back about it.

If you never use a phone number they give you and always look up the number on your own, they can never scam you. Here's how it looks.

"hi, i'm from your bank and your account has just been charged, just, so much money, we're worried it might be fraud."

"Thank you for letting me know, I'll call back later, goodbye"

Then i look up my bank's phone number, and call that number, and tell them i received a call about suspicious activity on my account.

If it's real, they'll help me with it, and if it's not they'll confirm it's not true. Either way, i know i'm talking to the actual bank and not a scammer.

This works for ALL phone scammers, no matter how scary or time sensitive they try to tell you it is. If it's real, something like "i'm driving right now but i'll call back in a few minutes, no thank you i already have the contact information for your agency/business" is ALWAYS an acceptable answer, at most they will want to give you some kind of a case number before you hang up. The more they resist you calling them back from a number you look up, the more likely they are to be a scam.

It's important that YOU call the number of the agency/business. Don't let them "call you back from the main number", it's possible to spoof caller IDs including government numbers.

and don't use google search results, go to the actual agency website

I'm an attorney, and there is a very simple reason this is good advice.

There is something called a "notice requirement" that means that in the US, if you aren't notified of a legal issue, you can't be held liable for that issue. Say there is a federal case against you. Well, they have to prove at some point that they told you about it. How do you prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you told someone something over the phone? Spoiler, its really really hard.

So anyone who is claiming to be a high level official likely has a lawyer they are working with, yes? They would not calling you out of the blue. They are sending you papers in the mail and getting you to sign for those papers, or their lawyers are screaming at them. A mid-level functionary following up on fraud might be from the bank, but huge chunks of their job are cleaning up after scammers, and they would be relieved to hear you say you're going to look it up independently. I used to work for a bank, and let me tell you, no one at the bank would be even slightly upset at you calling back.

Anyone, and I mean anyone, who you've never spoken to before calls you out of the blue demanding money or information, you assume they are trying to scam you.

But also, sadly, large implant organisations absolutely do call you and have NO IDEA why you might want to phone them back.

But usually, not for something important and urgent. If you're in official trouble, they will have sent you some sort of important letter, usually a LOT of them. If they WANT to deal with it, they'll try to talk to you (surprisingly many tax situations are "we want you to pay what we think you owe" not "we want to punish you"). If they want to arrest you, they already would have. There's no reason for them to give you a last chance to give them money an hour before the deadline.

The midjourney stuff just reminds of when we were trying to find a new platform to host the ao3 donation form, and companies kept trying to tell me about all their "ai" features that would track donor engagement, and figure out the optimal pattern to email individual donors asking for follow up donations, and all the ways they suggest we manipulate people into staying on our websites. It was a great way to filter out who either wasn't listening to us when we described our ethics and donor base, or just didn't believe us.

Now granted ao3 is a unique case based on a) the amount of page views we get in any given time period and b) the fact that most donors absolutely do Not want to be identified as such anywhere, (the default "list of recent donors" module got nuked Immediately) but it surprised me some that the concept of "donors who value their privacy and would be furious at even the whiff of AI" is unique. Some of us really are just existing in different worlds.

Op's tags

#I just started dropping '2.5 Billion page views a month'#into conversations as early as possible bc they would Not believe me otherwise#it was right up there with having to say 'csam attacks' to get them to take my compartmentalization of information concerns seriously#turns out those are the magic words#otw#op

The last part was kind of insane, honestly. When we started changing platforms for the donor database, I kept telling them that yes I was aware we already had an account for the volunteer database, and no that could not be connected to the donor database. And they said yes fine sure and then connected them anyway. And I called them back and said, excuse me, I'm confused, I can see both databases. And they said, well, yeah, but it's only you, someone has to be able to see both databases to give other users access. The other users can't see both. And I said, no, we have been asking for a completely separate database. I should not be able to see both. And they said, you are one organization, one organization can't have two databases. And I said, last year someone used our volunteer email list to commit approximately one thousand felonies. Please feel free to imagine how much worse it could have been had they had a way to use volunteers' email addresses to get their legal names. We do not want this to be something anyone can do no matter how much we trust them. Let me describe those felonies to you in more detail. And they emailed me two hours later and said, you can have two separate databases.

This post feels like watching an iceberg go by in clear water. The amount of stuff going on beneath the surface of AO3 just astonishes.

(ID in alt)

last night I conceived of a truly diabolical plan of pointless and petty evil and I shall have such fun putting it into action. a little birthday present to myself.

so the evil plan was to invite my friend who Deeply Hates Boardgames™️ over for a little party and, once everyone was seated at the table, produce a copy of Dune Imperium and say “finally we have enough players!”

I was going to wait for their face to crumble in horror and dismay while I whined that I was a little birthday boy and I really wanted to play the game before I lifted the lid and revealed that it contained only a cake, at which point I would laugh maniacally

only instead of protesting, my poor sweet loyal friend only sighed in resignation and braced themself for a tedious board game… out of love for me… I literally bought two empty board game boxes for the express purpose of tormenting my best buddy and how am I rewarded for my troubles? with gentle indulgence and forgiveness. disgusting.

#and that friend was me. I was SO ready to suffer so you could be a special birthday boy habibi#ain’t nobody i’d suffer through a dune board game for aside from you.#I did FAR prefer the rum cake to board games though 🤣🤣🤣#friends tag

once again my evil plans were foiled by underestimating the Power of Love. classic blunder.

:D

To a bridge player, hell is three bridge players and a deck of cards.

To a non-bridge-player, hell is three bridge players and a deck of cards.

every time i see a tweet like this i think “why do you play with people like this”. like why is dnd play culture so bad that this is an Archetypal Type of Guy they all seem to recognise. can you imagine tweeting this about any other hobby?? ‘musicians: what do you do about the guy in your band who screams I HATE MUSIC and tries to eat the drumsticks every rehearsal’

Two things

have you tried playing with people you like and respect instead

Most people test boundaries! It's good to have some space where people can do whatever.

But people shouldn't go ON, ONLY doing that.

Avoid, kind of fudging it or it will go on and on. Most straightforwardly, ask them not to.

Or, just let it play out. They're arrested, or can't complete the quest, or everyone flees from them on sight. Don't usually do this, it's usually a pain for the other players. But if people would LIKE some sandbox, then let it.

Also look at what the players wanted. Do they want to ruin the fun? If so, there's no fix, just don't play with them. Do they want some freedom? Some combat? Some grit? Include those things. Are they bored? Make more stuff to do, less infodump

"xyz DNI" blocking people is YOUR job, sorry. You cannot ask the world to simply move around you, you have to take control of your online experience or you will be fucking miserable forever. Most people don't read your bio/pinned/carrd before touching the posts that cross their dash anyways.

Also maybe worry less about if someone who likes something you hate clicks on your tumblr post. I promise it is not that fucking serious.

Also-also if you have this DNI because your friends/moots said or implied you have to otherwise you're somehow Bad and/or will be punished by them if you don't, that's kind of fucked and maybe you need less controlling friends.

I know you feel ethically helpless on this bitch of an earth but I promise you, telling people with certain fetishes or god forbid media interests not to interact with your posts is doing less than nothing to make the world any different, but it IS stressing you the fuck out to be worried about if the clicks you get on the internet are coming from someone who likes to imagine The Wrong Fictional Characters kissing.

For the love of god, shipping is not that fucking important. I promise you, whatever the fuck you think you know about someone based on what they ship can be determined by the shit they actually do in the real world about real things that actually happen.

Media consumption is not activism and fandom is not the battleground upon which Ethics And Morals will live or die. It is playing pretend. Please please please get some perspective

The whole "DNI" thing began in fandom as a way to say: "here's an opinion I have, and I know the opinion is not universal, and I don't really want to hear people disagreeing in the tags so like, please just leave it." It was not a way to say "hey, I dislike this whole subsection of humanity and if you engage with my work I'm going to scream."

example: "God I get so frustrated with the whole thing where Aragorn doesn't struggle not to take the ring like, at all, as though his line wasn't the reason Sauron still reigns. As though him being 'king' somehow shields him. It didn't shield Isildur! (I know, I know. Aragorn stans DNI)"

It's frustrating that it's moved to a position of purity and judgement. Like, the above example isn't "I'm right, you're wrong, fuck off" it's just "I know it's not a universal opinion, let me vent". It was a signal to the readers that the OP wasn't going to get involved in certain discussions, and if someone reblogged with "but Aragorn is the best because...", the OP would just not engage with that post, because they'd already indicated they didn't want to. Or they'd block that person and move on. They wouldn't (in my experience) dogpile on the person and run them through the coals.

Tl;dr: tags are to tell your readers something about your own viewpoints, not to control their behavior. If you tag "Men DNI", then you are decidedly telling me something about your viewpoint. And it's rancid.

I assumed Aragorn struggled. When he looked in the palantir he succeeded, but he struggled.

my observation from 2 months of kittens

Angry birb

I’ve gone insane and started writing a cliche fantasy novel

why did nobody tell me that writing is the adult equivalent of playing with dolls

AND WHAT A LONG WAY WE’VE COME!

Ok i need to know are these still the chapter titles

oh those aren’t the chapter titles, those are the first lines in each chapter.

this is a chapter title:

APPARENTLY IT'S NOT OUT YET

I want to read it. I have it bookmarked.

I don't know if there's going to be an ebook?

this entry in a ‘what would happen if the internet went down tomorrow’ contest has been making me laugh since 2009

Do you know how bugfuck insane the words "Unionized Starbucks" would have sounded to someone in 2005? Baristas getting union-mandated breaks could have been a throwaway joke in part of the Scary Movie franchise as something ridiculous.

RALPH NADER WAS AGITATING FOR A FIFTEEN DOLLAR MINIMUM WAGE IN 2004 AND SHIT IS MOVING SLOWLY BUT MY STATE HAS A TWENTY DOLLAR MINIMUM WAGE FOR FAST FOOD WORKERS. WHEN I STARTED HIGH SCHOOL THE ONLY OPTION FOR AN ABORTION AFTER 7 WEEKS WAS SURGICAL AND NOW THERE'S A PILL.

FUCKING. ELECTRIC CARS. SO GODDAMNED MANY PEOPLE HAVE SOLAR PANELS ON THEIR HOUSES OR IN THEIR PARKING LOTS.

WE DON'T HAVE SMOG DAYS IN LOS ANGELES ANYMORE UNLESS THERE'S A FIRE AND IT'S BECAUSE OF CARB STANDARDS.

LITERALLY MILLIONS OF FUCKING PEOPLE TURNED OUT TO PROTEST POLICE BRUTALITY IN 2020 AND YOU CAN SAY "NOTHING HAPPENED" ALL YOU WANT BUT THE WAY PEOPLE TALK ABOUT IT NOW IS FUCKING DIFFERENT THAN THEY DID AFTER RODNEY KING AND NOW PEOPLE WILL STOP AND WATCH OUT FOR EACH OTHER INSTEAD OF GOING 'NOT MY BUSINESS'

THERE IS A MALARIA VACCINE THAT HAS BEEN GIVEN TO OVER A MILLION CHILDREN IN JUST THE LAST FIVE YEARS SINCE IT WAS APPROVED FOR USE OUTSIDE OF TRIALS

I think it's really important to remind people that things have, to some degree or another, always been shit. The more you learn about history, the more you realize that every time has deeply sucked in some profound way. This mythical Time Before Everything Was Bad doesn't exist. The more things change, the more they stay the same. It is always the best of times, it is always the worst of times. That's Samsara for ya.

I want to reiterate how far trans awareness and rights have come. I'd never encountered the concept until I was about 20, in the very early aughts. I have multiple friends who could not get healthcare of any kind until the ACA. I remember the party when domestic partnerships -- not marriage, just domestic partnerships -- were legalized in my state.

I think a lot of the utter bullshit we're seeing now is people reacting to that progress. Don't ever forget that it's happened, and it can happen again if it has to.

When I enlisted in the Coast Guard in 1993, Don't Ask Don't Tell was brand new. My enlistment papers still had the old "homosexual activity" questions crossed out in Sharpie. That's all dead and buried now. It's history.

I grew up in the Satanic Panic. Actual, legal adults worried about the sanity and immortal souls of kids because we played Dungeons & Dragons. This summer, 2024, I bought literal actual official D&D US Postage Stamps. We went from "omg threat to children" to normal enough to be a fucking stamp.

People—assholes—have been crying about "political correctness" all my life. PC was never really about anything more than maybe treating people with some basic respect, and y'know what? Despite all the conservative tears, it DID move the dial on how people talk. It fucking mattered. It still matters.

And green energy is happening whether some assholes in government like it or not. It's getting cheaper and it's spreading and fossil fuels look like a worse long-term investment all the time, regardless of who's in the White House.

Things do get better. The world has always been rough, and many things will continue to be rough. But in spite of that, many things are way better than they used to be, and they'll keep getting better no matter how many rich and bigoted assholes throw tantrums about it.

lol

@demilypyro

Checked to confirm. It’s true, it’s recent, and the source is beautiful

(also the ‘children’s charity’ Lumos doesn’t recognize trans children, so this failed fundraising event is an all around good thing)

Oh gods, alright. Of course Livraria Lello would be the one to have it. I wonder if they were trying to get rid of it?

I actually would like to talk about Lello and their relationship with Harry Potter and also just ask you to visit the bookstore.

So, anyway, Lello opened in 1906 in Porto, North of Portugal.

JK. Rowling lived in Porto for a bit in the 90’s, where she first started writing the Harry Potter series. It was said she might have frequented it and some important stairs from the book were based on Lello’s stairs. In fact: The book release of Harry Potter and The Cursed Child happened in Lello.

What this meant is that this bookstore ended up having to fight to remain a bookstore. There are so many tourists, a lot of them that only wanted to look at it because it was Harry Potter related somehow and buy nothing. There were (and still are) insane queues to enter the bookstore.

Lello, who wasn’t particularly interested in becoming a Harry Potter museum, ended up having to make a system where people have to pay to enter. If you buy a book that goes above the price you paid for the ticket, the money you paid will be deducted from the book price.

I can tell from going there fairly frequently that they try to be less connected to Harry Potter as possible if they can manage. Yeah they have the books for sale but they also have a plethora of books and their own merchandise to choose from.

Despite JK. Rowling’s involvement with the bookstore, in the Portuguese Wikipedia page, even in the part about the famous writers that went there, there isn’t a single mention of her. Zero. Not in the history nor anywhere else. It’s beautiful.

Last time I went they had an exhibition about José Saramago’s work (portuguese author who won the Nobel Prize) and on the upper side of the stairs had an enormous collection of winners of the Nobel Prize and authors Lello concidered had the quality to also have won (it the Nobel Prize existed when they were alive) and authors that might win.

It’s quite interesting because all was very thought out and you had a whole reason as to why those books were there. Me and my mother ended up chatting for a long while with one of the bookshop employees (they have a lot of young employees btw) and we even ended up chatting with other foreigners that went there shopping.

Also, did I mentionthe bookshop is gorgeous?

As are their book editions (my English edition of Tom Sawyer I bought there)

Have also a photo of the bookstore from 1906 :)

So, if you go there, please don’t go because of Harry Potter. And please don’t shit on it because of Harry Potter too. It’s a very good bookstore and it deserves recognition, but not from there.

A drawing in chalk

The first bit! And then the second bit!! AND THEN THE THIRD BIT!

Autistic spaces are getting so much more hostile towards people with low empathy, and it sucks

There was a subreddit I really liked, people were chill, and then there was a sudden influx of people making posts like ‘Autistic people have empathy! Saying we don’t makes us seem like monsters! Thats not a symptom!’ And people making posts explaining that no, actually, some of us do have low empathy got attacked and told they were wrong or ableist? And it sucks, because its just so hard to find a place to exist where you can be seen as not evil? I don’t know, it just hurts a lot to be told that

Multiple things can be true at once

I would also like people to distinguish "Caring how people feel", "Intuiting how people feel" and "Being attuned to how people feel". I know there are scientific terms but I don't know how good the categorisation is

I heard an LGBTQ+ rights lawyer say once that we've gone from "the love that dare not speak its name" to "the love that will not shut the fuck up" and honestly I think that's beautiful.

BRO?

Reblog if you're self indulgent and perverted lmao

fellas is it perverted to think happy thoughts

Reblog if you *checks notes* are not a miserable fuck.

Tumblr users being deranged and masturbatory LIKE SHAKESPEARE.

While it was a longshot, I do appreciate that Gimli did try chopping the Ring up with an axe first. It was worth a shot, and they'd have all felt like bloody idiots if they took the Ring all the way to Mordor only to find out it could have been chopped up by an axe all along.

Yeah. Like Han shooting Vader. You don't EXPECT it to work, but RIGHT CALL

Otoh, he'd have felt AWFUL if it released Sauron's evil soul or something :)

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