Racing Turtles

The funniest thing about this situation is that Elon Musk is so pissed off at not getting to do something illegal and get away with it by being a billionaire for once in his life that he has been -and I’m 100% serious here- making photo edits of our Supreme Court minister dressed as fucking Voldemort. Literal little kid taping a picture of someone they don’t like to a dartboard kind of behavior.

Brazilian Supreme Court: Hey, uh. Just letting you know that what you’re doing is a crass violation of Brazilian law and if you don’t remedy it on the next 24h we’ll shut your website down in Brazil.

Elon Musk:

Sorry, I just looked it up and it turns out I got it slightly wrong: Elon Musk didn't photoshop a picture of Alexandre de Moraes, the Brazilian Supreme Court minister into Voldemort. Pretty silly of me to think someone like him would put in the effort to actually edit a picture himself.

What ACTUALLY happened was that Elon Musk first compared Alexandre de Moraes to Voldemort, then posted an Al generated image of him behind bars and told him to "mark his words because it'll happen for real someday", then posted another Al generated picture of him as a roll of toilet paper and then, finally, posted a picture of him photoshopped into a Sith Lord that he claimed had been generated by that shitty Grok Al thing they came up with, just to eventually admit that it was actually some random edit someone else had made he took from Google Images because "Al made him look too badass". In this order.

Well, it’s a little bit of a convoluted story, but remember the US capitol invasion by Trump Supporters in January 2021? Brazil was being governed by our own far-right asshole back then as well, Jair Bolsonaro. When he was running for president, his political party orchestrated a large misinformation campaign, speeding fear mongering rumors about the left through social media and instant messaging apps to try and sway people into voting for them. A bunch of these rumors were, unsurprisingly, about how “the left is teaching your kids to be gay in school.” Even after he Bolsonaro was elected, there still were lots of people and communities in these platforms dedicated to spreading rumors in his favor.

Bolsonaro, however, did such a shitty job handling the COVID pandemic and was responsible for (and very indifferent about) so many people losing their lives that it irreversibly soured his popularity. As a result, he wasn’t reelected in 2022 and lost to Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, the leftist party candidate. So, in January 2023, two days after the anniversary of the US capitol invasion, Bolsonaro’s remaining supporters were called to arms through these misinformation spreading platforms to storm Brazil’s Supreme Court building, the congress building and the presidential palace to try and stage a coup and reinstate Bolsonaro as president. They weren’t successful, thankfully, but they caused a lot of damage to the buildings and hurt people in the process.

Ever since this happened, the Brazilian supreme court has been trying to properly identify and bring every person responsible for this attack to justice, including the people who were behind the scenes spreading rumors and organizing the whole thing. So it was ruled that the social media and messaging apps that were used to spread misinformation and organize this attempted coup should hand the information they had about these people over so they could be properly investigated and prosecuted, and ban them from using their services. Not doing so was, by very definition, obstruction of Brazilian justice and therefore a criminal act. Twitter, at the time not ran by a conservative dipshit, was cooperative at first.

Enter Elon Musk, known conservative dipshit, who takes over Twitter, changes it to X and refuses to cooperate with the investigation, saying that it is a “violation of the free speech of the accused”. Upon being told by our Supreme Court minister, Alexandre de Moraes, that he was breaking Brazilian law, he got all pissy, ordered all of the X offices in Brazil to be closed down, accused Alexandre de Moraes of “just wanting his political opponents to be silenced”, threatening to unban everyone involved who had been previously banned before he took over X and calling him “not even a real minister because he wasn’t elected” Yeah, no shit, dumbass. Ministers get appointed by the president over here.

Anyway, due to being a dumbass, Musk didn’t realize that closing down X’s offices in Brazil wouldn’t really change the fact that he was still breaking Brazilian law and, in fact, was just more obstruction of justice. So, Alexandre de Moraes gave him until the 31st to send or appoint a new legal representative for X in Brazil to handle the court proceedings or X would be shut down in all of Brazil until he did. That’s when Musk started the Voldemort shit and made it clear he would NOT do that and saying that Alexandre de Moraes should be the one sent to jail for… I don’t even know. Wanting people who committed crimes to face the consequences of it?

To sum it up… X is almost definitely going to close down indefinitely in Brazil because Elon Musk can’t stop himself from acting like a petulant toddler whenever he’s told to do something he doesn’t want, is dying on the hill of “protecting the of free speech” of far-right criminals and the social media website he was forced to buy in order to not be charged of market manipulation that he has been steadily fucking to shit ever since is going to lose around 21 million users overnight. Masterful gambit, sir!

If people were too mean to you when you were growing up, a newborn animal will materialize inside your brain and it’s so so scared and shivering and it will stay there for years. Decades, even. And whenever you say something kind of weird but true to your heart the animal will tell you “Noo! You can’t say that! If you say that, everyone will hate you!”. The animal means well. It’s so so small and everything is so scary for them and it’s just trying to protect you. But listen to me. Listen to me. Whenever this happens, you can’t do what the animal says. You can’t. If you do, you’ll become as scared as the animal. You have to keep saying weird shit. You have to keep doing things the animal wouldn’t approve of. If you do enough things that scare the animal, maybe one day it’ll go to sleep.

Huh! I believe I’ve accidentally found out what the whole deal with this new wave of porn bots is.

OK so! First of all, I’ve got an answer to the age-old question “Why are pornbot blogs blank now? Shouldn’t they at least attempt to try to look like actual people?” and the answer is:

They’re blank themselves because they target blogs with posts on them.

I’ve noticed this one recently because I’ve got blank blogs I only ever use the draft function to store stuff in and never actually post on them. These blogs have never had any bots following them! I’ve also got a blog where I have never made an original post in, only reblogged stuff to. This blog gets bots following it, even after months of inactivity. So the reason these latest waves of bots keep their blogs empty is so they won’t accidentally follow themselves on an endless loop.

With that in mind and given something I found out entirely by accident a little while ago, I also have an answer to the following question: “So how do they trick people, if they don’t have any porn on them that could lead to people clicking their links?” and the answer is:

They’re trying to trick you into following them. And since they don’t have anything to draw attention to them in their blogs, they’re very probably counting on you doing so by accident.

I found this out by accidentally following one of them with my main account after blocking it when it had followed me on this account. Exactly 25 minutes later, it sent me this very obviously bot-generated message:

So what they do is mass follow accounts and hope you’ll follow them by accident while looking them up or even trying to block them instead. Then they’ll send you their scam/malware link! Of course, the message is all kinds of suspicious but that’s a known trick by people who employ spam: they’re actively selecting the most tech unsavvy people by making their messages ring all sorts of alarm bells to people who know even a bit about how the internet works, so only people who wouldn’t even begin to know how to report them will fall for it.

As for what exactly this link they send will do… I’m not sure, but given what these kinds of malicious links usually do I’m betting it’s either regular malware, ransomware, adware, a crypto mining net trying to use your computer to mine bitcoin or your average old fashioned scam: they’ll make you sign up for some sketchy fake camgirl website and promise you nude pictures in exchange for your credit card information. Which they’ll never deliver.

So that’s it! As long as you don’t follow them back you shouldn’t have any problems with them, but even so the best tactic is to report them on sight so they’ll be deleted.

Have the Tumblr app designers considered putting space between the Follow button and the button we have to tap to get at Report and Block? The human fingertip is not that small.

[ID: google translate of english to norwegian. The inputed english is: "sense during speech" and the outputted norwegian is "sans under tale".

Second image is a gif from Breaking Bad, of the character Walter White gasping in despair and falling to his knees. End ID]

LIES and SLANDER! This is more like it:

I’ve seen some people here getting insanely up in arms about people tagging their posts as fictional characters and it’s like… that’s literally one of the most harmless things someone can do to your posts. Believe me.

I myself don’t care at all, if I tell a funny story about something that happened to me and someone reblogs it and goes “this is JUST like when Jean-Pierre and Kevin found the Magic Stone” I just nod. No idea who these people are but I agree. Typical Jean-Pierre and Kevin behavior.

Intentional misspellings and unusual handling of words is one of my favorite “minor” memes tbh I love it so much. Here are some of my all time favorites:

▪ Replacing “ck” with “cc” (ie. succ, thicc)

▪ Replacing “t” with “d” and vice-versa (ie. gotdamn,shid,blocket)

▪ Just… every kind of weird variation you can do with the word “fuck” (ie. fuckening, fucky)

▪ Weird jumbling of curse words that somewhat resemble something coherent (ie. mother fuck of a shit, shut the hell your mouth)

▪ Replacing a vowel in a word with another (ie. borger)

why have you analysed this

I don’t really remember the exact mindset I was in when I wrote this but it was probably something like “ohhhmmff english lamguage cool”

What I love about trends like this is it demonstrates our adaptability when it comes to our medium of communication. Text communication by its nature runs the risk of being dry and boring and very difficult to use expressively by traditional means. But the difference between “I’m hungry” and “im hongry” is distinct and vivid. We’ve found playful, interesting, and fun ways to use what could’ve been an incredibly dull and boring and ‘same-y’ means of talking to each other. 

We’re playful beings and I think this is one way we demonstrate that, and I guess I also just think that’s kind of adorable of us. 

Intentional misspellings and unusual handling of words is one of my favorite “minor” memes tbh I love it so much. Here are some of my all time favorites:

▪ Replacing “ck” with “cc” (ie. succ, thicc)

▪ Replacing “t” with “d” and vice-versa (ie. gotdamn,shid,blocket)

▪ Just… every kind of weird variation you can do with the word “fuck” (ie. fuckening, fucky)

▪ Weird jumbling of curse words that somewhat resemble something coherent (ie. mother fuck of a shit, shut the hell your mouth)

▪ Replacing a vowel in a word with another (ie. borger)

why have you analysed this

I don’t really remember the exact mindset I was in when I wrote this but it was probably something like “ohhhmmff english lamguage cool”