The United States Postal Inspection Service has existed in some form longer than the united states itself has, when Benjamin Franklin appointed the first “surveyor” over oversee the mail (make sure there were no mail crimes happening) in, I think, 1772. They have a conviction rate of 98% which is probably because if you’re dumb enough to do mail crimes and it’s discovered I mean. If you do mail crime and no one ever learns about it, obviously you can’t be charged, if you do mail crime and it’s discovered and you get CAUGHT then I think the conviction rate is probably so high because they just have you dead to rights.
A fun fact related to mail crimes: The reason spam mail is listed as “To our friends at (address)” or “(name) or current resident” is because it is ILLEGAL to open mail for someone else. The only way they can mail out the coupons or whatever they might be selling to as many people as possible, and for it to be legal for the recipients to open it, is for who it’s addressed to to be vague.
Annual reminder than if you think/know someone is stealing/damaging/destroying your mail then you can try to get in contact with your local postal inspector. They take these crimes very seriously, and it is a federal felony (in the US) called “Obstruction of Correspondence”
As for the craziest mail crime??? A person from the Postal Inspector Forensics Lab (probably not the actual name) was the person who realized all the bombs sent by the unabomber were the same person, and this is part of what led to his arrest. I don’t know how much everyone is familiar with that case but he sent the bombs by mail.
Other than that the anthrax attacks in 2001 were done by mail, though I am not super familiar with it and couldn’t tell you how crucial the Postal Inspectors were in figuring out the case.
I think actors should be banned from wearing prosthetics solely to change their appearance to the way that an actual person looks*. No fat suits. No fake noses. Actually cast actors that look like your characters.
*Prosthetics for the purposes of inhuman stuff is fine. Prosthetics that the actor wears irl are fine. This is about actors playing fat people when they’re thin, or playing Jewish people when they look nothing like the person.
“Kaynemaile has worked tirelessly to perfect the material science behind beautiful architectural mesh, collaborating with architects and designers on projects that embolden urban environments with positive buildings. The company’s patented polycarbonate mesh, inspired by 2,000-year-old medieval chainmail, was initially created for the armor and weapons seen in the The Lord of The Rings movie trilogy and is now used on major architectural projects around the world.
“The film’s art director and Kaynemaile’s founder Kayne Horsham worked with his team to construct each garment from plastic plumbing tubes, coating them in pure silver. Once filming wrapped, Horsham dedicated himself to creating a change to the liquid state assembly process to mass produce the polycarbonate chainmail for architectural applications — products that were light, but strong enough to protect the interior or exterior of a building. Now an industry-leading manufacturer, Kaynemaile produces mesh for everything from small interior screens to large scale exterior façades. Their mesh is easy to install and can be custom created for specialized applications.”
‘Are these magic cloaks?’ asked Pippin, looking at them. with wonder.
‘I do not know what you mean by that,’ answered the leader of the Elves. ‘They are fair garments, and the web is good, for it was made in this land. They are Elvish robes certainly, if that is what you mean. Leaf and branch, water and stone: they have the hue and beauty of all these things under the twilight of Lorien that we love; for we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make.”
- Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter 8: Farewell to Lorien
This is how I think of Jackson’s movies. Yes, there are serious flaws - Gandalf’s de-powering, Gimli as comic relief, and Faramir, namely - but come on.
Remember when the guys making their chain mail invented a new method for quickly producing large amounts of it by hand? Remember Miranda Otto walking down the street, practicing sword positions? The guys who forged all of the swords - for leads and for extras? The men and women riders who volunteered to be riders of Rohan? The costume designers who designed the inside of Theoden’s armor (which no one would ever see) so beautifully that Bernard Hill said he felt like a king? The friendships between the cast, and their size doubles, and the stuntmen?
they took forced perspective and scaled sets to a new level by adding moving set pieces to create the illusion that the hobbits and dwarves were much smaller than everyone else even when the camera moved.
every scene you see in the 11+ hours of glory that is the LOTR masterpiece is most like ridiculously elaborate or expensive–from model towers to the all-new motion capture technology used for gollum to the costumes and sets to the aerial on location shots of mother-fracking new zealand and the big impressive battle scenes and horse charges.
but then the story and the screenplay too–there is just SO much lore that is there
in the background lurking
if you want to look for it, yet it still remains simplified for the average viewer. Crazy impressive feat.
And the acting is heartfelt and real and makes you love the characters.
ALSO DON’T GET ME STARTED ON FREAKING HOWARD SHORE AND HIS 100+ HEARTSHATTERINGLY BEAUTIFUL LIETMOTIFS AND BRILLIANT SUBTLE VARIATIONS IN THE FLIPPING 13 HOUR SOUNDTRACK. AND ENYA SINGING IN REAL ELVISH.
Hey, baby witches, hatchling mages, and second instar sorcerers…
If you see somebody on the Internet claiming they’re setting up some kind of spiritual/magical academy, or looking for worthy pupils to teach, or - and especially - looking for a worthy pupil to teach, you need to be very wary.
Literally anybody can claim that they have all kinds of deep, true spiritual knowledge. Literally anybody can scrounge up a few mystical books and learn just enough to make it seem like they know a lot to someone new to magic and mysticism. Anybody can whip up some conspiracy theory to explain why the stuff they just pulled out of their bum three minutes ago isn’t accepted by academic scholars and mainstream religion.
(And speaking of conspiracy theories, most conspiracy theories you’re going to run into are going to be some variant on The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and/or blood libel and early modern witch panic. Some conspiracy theorists swap out “Jews” for “the Catholic Church” or something, but it’s no less bullshit because the source is the same.)
It’s always worth asking yourself, “How do I know they aren’t lying to me?” And don’t just go with “I can just sense they’re telling the truth” because it really does not work that way. What you might be “sensing” is their conviction in their own bullshit. Or they might be a really good liar. Or they might be saying stuff that feels true because it seems to confirm your own biases.
Also, if you see somebody telling you that reaching your highest magical potential means doing some kind of sex magic, or offering to teach sex magic to beginners, run. This person is a sexual predator.
I recommend ESOTERICA and Angela’s Symposium to start getting a grounded view of religious and spiritual history, which will make it much less likely you’ll fall for a scam.
Also, remember that at the end of the day, vital spiritual or magical knowledge is not locked away with any individual person or even group. The main thing that any specific person or group has is their own take on things, which generally as subjective as anybody else’s.
Just because information is commonly available doesn’t mean it’s automatically bad or wrong. Like yeah, you do need to be critical about what you read in books or on the Internet, but you need to be just as critical with an actual human being claiming to have the really deep secrets.
I’m about forty seven seconds away from saying “fuck it,” ignoring every single tutorial and how-to that i’ve seen on the subject, and starting a hexagon quilt with no plan or experience or tools aside from basic-ass hand-sewing equipment and One (1) stencil.
Irons and multiple hexagons and glue sticks are bourgeois extravagance.
(I’m going to make the worst quilt)
FOR THE RECORD I am already working on a DIFFERENT worst quilt.
So over the years I have had a variety of Funney T-Shirts because I shopped at Hot Topic in the late nineties and early two thousands (the first thing I ever owned from Hot Topic was a lucky 13 tee shirt that my parents got me when I was twelve because they were out with my sister and “found a store we thought you might like” and they were unfortunately correct) but also because I’ve done a bunch of weird shit in my life and people give you tee shirts for working at different stores or yearbook camps or hacker conferences. So I have all these tees that I am 100% not going to wear ever again but I don’t want to THROW THEM AWAY (both because they are cool and because my brain is broken and half of it is dedicated to the corvid shiny thing instinct).
But just a patchwork of tee shirts is? That’s been done. I’ve seen that. Sororities do that.
Bull shit.
So I’m slowly saving up the denim from every pair of jeans that I wear out and cutting them to pieces and stitching them together and when I’ve got WAY TOO MUCH OF THAT to be reasonable I’m going to start blanket stitching tee shirts to the front of it to make what is essentially an enormous patch jacket that will weigh forty pounds that nobody but me is ever going to want to sleep under and that is FINE. It’s going to get added to my collection of utterly reprehensible blankets.
If your multi-decade craft project doesn’t end up looking like a pair of crust pants what even is the point?
Kinda loving your whole vibe right now.
I just watched four origami videos about how to fold a hexagon out of a square (rulers? protractors? Fuck that), cut out three fucked up hexagons, got fed up, turned up the brightness on my screen, traced a regular hexagon from math.wikia.com, and then the only card stock I had handy was a card from my band so this whole thing is becoming a punk socialist mood.
baste
I made a mask out of space kitten fabric and it is horribly uncomfortable to wear and it’s currently three hundred miles away and I’m already planning on cutting the stitches out and making kitten eye hexagons.
Yeeeeeeee
Cut hexagons vs. Basted hexagons.
Someone asked how I am basting the hexagons, so this is it.
Progresssssssss
I only had half of a fat quarter of the kitten fabric and I am seriously considering trying to find more because I *ADORE* how awful it is. I bought it early in the pandemic because I had moved unexpectedly and didn’t have any of my stuff from home and needed to make some masks and it was literally the only fabric that was still in stock at the local WalMart.
I legitimately love the pink and yellow citrus print. The hot pink tigerstripe is left over from adding panels to one of my vests. The navy blue sharks are the sleeves of a shirt that only sort of fits me and honestly I love that so much I’m thinking about taking apart the rest of the shirt. The one with the blue background and white flowers is a totally different material than all of the rest and is probably a bad choice to use in a quilt but that’s all of it, that’s all I’ve got, all the hexagons are cut out of an 8″x8″ square. The bees are incredible and I have literally two yards of bee fabric. I wish I had fabric that was like the bee fabric but with a variety of spiders.
Anyway, I’m very happy with how it’s all coming together and I’m pleased that so many people find it engaging and creepy.
Progress and a creachur.
245 horrible hexagons so far.
Tiny Bastard continues to offer moral support and physical impedance.
For those who aren’t familiar, this is the horrible hexagon quilt so far. Doing 7 hexagons/1 piece a week will more than double the size of it, which is why that’s my goal. Since people are curious I guess I’ll do the unicorn ass piece first.
Horrible hexagon update. Phone for scale. This is all of the hexagons before my 1 piece a week goal. This is the unicorn ass piece:
Wait, wait, wait, wait. Go back. I’m interested in your extant collection of reprehensible blankets.
The main one is the Ugly Blanket, seen here underneath my dog:
It’s like 400 squares of the cheapest red heart supersaver yarn out there crocheted into squares that were then whipstitched into rows that were then whipstitched together into like 15 pounds of scratchy (but extremely warm!) acrylic. It started falling apart a bit so I crocheted a border around it. It was initially a scrap quilt, which is why it’s such a clashy combination of colors.
The Horrible Hexagons and the Denim Disaster are thus far theoretical utterly reprehensible blankets that I plan on making and owning eventually.
I also have a circular blanket that I call the Geode Blanket that is made out of mandela self-striping yarn and *I* don’t think that one is ugly, but some people utterly without taste do (my mother in law hates it).
I apparently haven’t taken a complete photo of this one, but it is now about six feet wide and lives on the back of my couch.
Vibes. I’m not good with numbers so anything that requires counting is right out, I just added a stitch when it seemed right, which is why the blanket is a bit frilly instead of perfectly circular (which is why my MiL hates it). Full blanket:
The number of people in the notes who forgot/didn’t know that ‘hand’ is short for ‘farmhand’ and just assumed that the farmer for some reason had a sapient detached hand is sending me
Permission to use this as a quote in my high school classes?
oh always
Not with that attitude
>_> must we, while the world is on fire.
Fandoms get people together, people with common goals and beliefs. Fandoms also get the common people in the group too, people who otherwise would find topics intimidating. Fandoms get people to explore topics, and find new & deeper layers to it that the average person may not notice but the group as a whole does. And importantly, fandoms get big numbers, and fandoms get things done
For example, on multiple occasions fandoms have been able to provide funding for projects that cost thousands or even over million dollars to complete, that without their fandoms would have flopped due to lack of investors (eg Homestuck Videogame Fundraiser, Undertale, and Lackadaisy Animated Series, to name a few)
Fandoms have also gathered together huge numbers of minds to work towards common goals and complete sometimes planet-spanning puzzles (ARGs)
Oh and of course the most reliable way to get new scientists is by making people INTERESTED IN SCIENCE
Okay but the thing is then people act like personal opinion matters in science like it does in fandom and then we have the situation like we did this last weekend where numpties are telling professional scientists we are wrong and there was no way for us to control the spread of misinformation so like
Maybe it needs to be a wee bit more serious and treated with a wee bit more respect than a fandom.
Also like. None of those things that fandoms do are exclusive to fandom culture? You know what else gets people together in big groups with common interests and goals, and encourages people to dig deeper and learn more?
Science????
I love palaeontology. I have been interested in palaeontology since I was a child. I find it fascinating and it is one of the things I am most passionate about in the world.
It is also a discipline of science that I am currently in the process of earning a degree in. It is the study of real life on this planet, and ultimately what is considered factual in science is not subject to popular public opinion but is instead subject to evidence that is investigated by people to have dedicated their lives and careers to learning about this stuff.
Fandom is fine, I wouldn’t say I’m really involved in any specific fandoms but they seem like they provide an enjoyable sense of community. But like. Can we please not conflate everything that people are passionate about as a “fandom”?
Paleontology is not “the dinosaur fandom”, it is a science.
Fandom encourages personal interpretation. “Death of the author” and all that. Coming up with your own interpretation based on the parts of the canon you like is a large part of what fandom is.
“Ignoring the facts you don’t like in order to create your own interpretation” in science, on the other hand, is a very, very bad thing known as “science denialism”. This is how you end up, on the most benevolent end of the spectrum, with people who insist that Pluto is a planet or that birds aren’t dinosaurs, simply because that’s what they were taught and they *don’t like* the new facts.
On the other end of the spectrum of science denialism, you have people sending death threats to climate change scientists and making their autistic kids drink bleach. The same “I can pick and choose which facts are real and decide that I KNOW BETTER than the researchers who have spent years studying this subject” tendency that leads to people arguing with astronomers that PLUTO IS STILL A PLANET BECAUSE I SAID SO is also what leads to people insisting that the Earth is flat.
Sure, the consequences of dwarf planet denialism and climate change denialism are orders of magnitude apart. But they come from the same source, and that’s the “I know better than experts” attitude.
if i could pick a single ancient roman to bring back to modern time i would pick an old man who used to build roads and let him loose among the italian grandpas who stand around at construction sites. i think the cultural exchange would be beautiful
Punk is whatever the state fucking hates so I’m sorry to announce to the functionally conservative but contemporary punk isn’t leather jackets and punk rock from the 2000s, it’s hyperfemininity, it’s transsexualism, it’s kinky leather harnesses, it’s polyamory, it’s Black female rappers, it’s reading books from the library, it’s pirating media, it’s sharing your Netflix and Prime and Spotify passwords, it’s patching up your thrifted clothes with cute embroidery until they’re in tatters, it’s “borrowing” groceries from corporations that make up inflation that doesn’t exist, it’s supporting small weird freaky artists on Etsy instead of buying the newest Official™️ boring low effort promotional image enamel pins, it’s drawing and writing the raunchiest most disgusting and freaky porn you could possibly fathom, it’s showing off your tits or top surgery scars in public, it’s cis women packing and cis men tucking, it’s dykefags and fagdykes and boylesbians and girlgays, it’s paying for OnlyFans of trans people fisting themselves, it’s making up new genders and sexualities and romantic orientations and editing whole new flags for them, it’s refusing to label yourself for the gratification of a government that wants to know under what misspelled drafty legislation they should legally kill you
Punk is being/supporting whatever the state currently fucking despises and wants to burn off the face of the earth, not whatever you think is Punk Aesthetic. If you wanna be punk just to look like you were born in the 80s instead of actually BEING PUNK by supporting the degenerates and the freaks and the sex workers and the BIPOC and the transsexuals and the faggots and the dykes, burn your fucking $800 corp bought leather jacket because you’re not Hobie Brown you’re just a fucking poser.
Punk is fighting the system beside the ones the system is fighting against, Punk isn’t a Pinterest moodboard.
Lovecraft and memes. Queer af. Sidebar pages to be updated. She/they. If you need me to tag anything for you, please let me know. General unpleasantness is tagged "unfortunately".
ALT
ALT
Lovecraft and memes. Queer af. Sidebar pages to be updated. She/they. If you need me to tag anything for you, please let me know. General unpleasantness is tagged "unfortunately".