harriehq

[harriehq]

Y'all been talking about Magnus Archives so I'm checking it out but they're running ads for crap WITH AI FEATURES woooooo.

Also. Like. The first episode already starts with four minutes of ads. Jesus fuck.

[harriehq]

My experience in the workforce has been that children are a "get out of work free" card and it's the childfree girlies like myself who gets all the extra work dumped on them because the boss's daughter threw up at kindergarten.

One night at one job I stayed late running COVID swabs through the test machine all by myself (in our basement wing that used to be a morgue back when the building was a tuberculosis sanatorium... I digress) because the others were like... "WE can't stay late!! It's IMPOSSIBLE!! We have CHILDREN!!!" I'm like, yea you're right I'm just going home to an empty apartment anyway, nobody cares if I get home late, nobody misses me. You're fucking welcome.

And then I had a big Mumford & Sons singalong with the ghosts, which I would much rather do than go home to squalling children and dirty diapers... but still. Wasn't quite fair, was it?

Another thing about the plummeting birth rate in America is that America is just not a pro-natalist country. No paid maternity leave. No paid paternity leave. Children are treated like burdens. Why the fuck would you have a kid if you’re seen as ‘flakey’ for leaving work early to go to their kindergarten graduation? When you live in this ultra individualistic capitalist hellscape, there is no room for a child.

[harriehq]

possession horror where the thing possessing the autistic character causes them to behave in a more neurotypical way. autistic possession horror where the thing inside you is easier to communicate with than you are, the thing inside you doesn’t have a flat affect, the thing inside you doesn’t let your body stim, the thing inside you is how you were told to behave and you can only do it when you are no longer you. autistic possession horror where you will never forget that everyone liked it better than you before they found out something was controlling you. autistic possession horror where they know what’s inside you isn’t you and debate whether it would be easier for everyone to leave you like this anyway. you agree. reblog.

[harriehq]

I love detective/murder shows set SPECIFICALLY in the late 2000s early 2010s that use the boom of digital photography / smart phones as a plot point.

Midsomer Murders, season 10 in 2007, the local photography nerds are cooing over a camera. "12.2 megapixels?!" It’s adorable. And the hardcore film guys explaining "computer editing" with such disdain when showing that an embarrassing photo was "digitally manipulated."

And right out of the gate with BBC Sherlock, 2010. It's a smart phone!!! So she can check her emails, guys!!!!

Even Doctor Who! Matt Smith's first episode, also 2010. The Doctor asks Rory, "WHY are you handing me your phone?!" And Rory stammers, "It’s a... smartphone. It has a... camera??" (or "it's a camera phone, it takes pictures" which is even funnier) *

I have feelings about how the internet and smartphones have kinda been the death of the cozy / amateur sleuth archetype. Mycroft could have been an armchair detective, after all. But that's a whole other thing!

I just love that brief time of transition where "a camera in my pocket?!" was novel and 12.2mp was cutting edge.

*(I was going to make a joke about the Time Lord not knowing about modern tech but if you think about it, considering he left child Amelia Pond in 1996 and returns in 2008, and was whirling about at the whims of a stroppy TARDIS, did he just... miss? That particular moment of human technology development? Like he knew they'd have them eventually but when he lands in 2008 he just wouldn't have been aware It Had Happened.)

[harriehq]

Gang, yes, use HIPAA to your advantage and scream about it to anyone who will listen, but it is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) not "HIPPA."

[harriehq]

"It's so fucked up women have to do sex work to survive" so trueee it's so fucked up we live in a capitalist society where you need to do work you don't want to do just to be alive. I'm so glad we're talking about ALL the jobs that are forced onto people, especially women, that are full of harassment. Thank God we're not just focusing on jobs that are already heavily stigmatized and shaming women for doing what's necessary to survive, even though every single person has to do that but for some reason it's immoral when it's a stripper instead of a fast food employee

[harriehq]

Pretty big clue that someone who says they are a Christian doesn't give a shit about following Jesus, aka the "Christ" part of Christianity, if the won't help their neighbor! And He had a bit about "who's your neighbor" too that they seem to have missed.

Do you want to be politically pure in theory or help your neighbor. Is it fruitless to help your neighbor because there's no Perfect Pure way to do it ?

[harriehq]

"All this digital art stuff, you know, it goes way over my head. But my wife, y'see, she has this cousin Lou. Now Lou's a real smart cookie, knows everything from Blender to Clip Studio, but the one thing they won't touch is AI. Says it wastes a whole lot of electricity for something that only looks good at a glance.

See, a computer, it can't think through things like a human can. You or I, when we look at a drawing of an apple, we can compare it to real apples we've seen. If you show us a drawing of some orange thing with spikes coming out every which way, well, we can tell you that sure doesn't look like an apple.

But a computer? All a computer can do is look at pictures of apples. And if you give that computer enough pictures of apples that are a little bit orange, or a little bit bumpy, well. It might just decide that spiky orange thing is an apple too. It takes a whole lot of pictures of apples to get the computer mostly good at guessing when things are apples or not.

Now, that's bad enough when you just want your computer to tell you what it sees. When you want a computer to make an image, though, that's where Lou says you really run into trouble. You put a piece of paper in front of me, give me a pencil, and tell me to draw an apple, it won't win any awards. But it'll be a new drawing. Nobody's ever drawn that exact same drawing the exact same way before.

But if you take your computer that's gotten pretty good at guessing when things are apples, and you tell it "okay, draw me an apple", it can't make a completely new drawing of an apple. Instead, it'll take the pictures you've given it and mash 'em together. Maybe, at the end, you won't be able to tell which pictures it used, but if you ask it for enough drawings of apples, you'll start seeing patterns...

I'm sorry, I'll get out of your hair. I know you have to get back to your painting.

Just one more thing... how many fingers does that man in the corner have?"

[harriehq]

Someday you're going to not be a teenager and you're going to be soooo embarrassed.

It's ok, we've all been there. I'm just saying. Brace yourself.

[harriehq]

Is this person complaining about... LIBBY?!

[harriehq]

babygirl

[harriehq]

Tintin Meets The Detectives

Art by Adam Murphy

[harriehq]

I basically/semi-literally perfomed a c-section on the worst printer jam I have ever seen, and I think my boss should have given the $100-400 they saved on a technician to me as a bonus. 😊

In hindsight, I shouldn't have fixed it. I should have just let them sweat. But I had to do the closing books that night, dammit.

But seriously, all it takes to become "the girl who knows how to fix computers" at the office is to not be afraid of clicking buttons at random until something happens.

Signed, a computer engineer's daughter who knows just enough to be dangerous. 😈 (And get really annoyed when the IT guys give me the boomer "have you tried rebooting?" line. Dude. I'm probably older than you. I was coding my own MySpace themes. I've seen The IT Crowd. I AM MY FATHER'S DAUGHTER. I know the drill. I've rebooted TWICE because I KNEW you were gonna ask.)

slowly becoming the designated DIY guy of my household not because of any skill or training but because im the only person with the hubris to say 'fuck it hand me a drill how hard can it be." highly reccomend it because it gives a butch thrill that cannot be matched. i understand why suburban dads are like this now. im unstoppable.

[harriehq]

This reminds me of an experience:

One time I was just hanging out on top of a big round hay bale... (I was a farm kid lol) and this SHADOW passed over me and it was deadly quiet and I looked up... and it was a fucking B-52 directly above me. 😅 I got *on the ground* because I knew the sonic boom was gonna roll me right off the haybale! It was like thunder, as if lightning had struck in the yard next to me. (We're in a flight path for an air force base's (McConnell??) practice runs, used to have other jets and little fighter jets escorting giant carriers flying so low you could count the stars on the flag on the tail going over all the time when I was little. Just the one B-52 that I know of!)

But gawwwwd just looking up in the dead silence, no wind, in the middle of nowhere farm country to see that big dark beast blotting out the sky right above your head...

I don't really enjoy sunny days, but there is something to be said for the experience of being suddenly overtaken by a tide of vivid little shadows surging along the ground from directly behind you, followed a few moments later by the flock that cast it swooping overhead

[harriehq]

Because 36 and saying "uh, remove your card?!" in my hardwired 90s kid "DUH, STUPID" tone doesn't make them happy, either. 😅

I don't necessarily do it on purpose, but there literally is no way -- especially for my autistic ass -- to verbally answer a question that stupid without offending the asker. So I just... say it? And I'm not sorry.

learning that 1. there's a thing called the 'gen z stare' 2. it pisses people off and 3. it's just underpaid service workers staring at someone until they follow a simple instruction, has been interesting.

for example, the card reader says 'remove card' the customer goes 'it says remove card, what do i do?' then some underpaid 20 year old just stares at whatever twat just asked that question. apparently that's devastating for baby boomers and gen x'ers, and they're complaining about it. retail workers should be allowed to jump the counter and kill customers

[harriehq]

Yea I live on a farm and can't drive. How about people interact with me instead of making it my fault.

ok note to self i gotta leave the house regularly so that i dont feel like im slowly transforming into an evil fucking shadow clone of myself

[harriehq]

But also the entire "community's" standards of cooperation and compassion can be totally warped through isolation and inbreeding*. These people aren't even nice to the people they "love."

* That's not a vague jab. I'm talking about my hometown of 1k ppl.

Not "humans are inherently good" or "humans are inherently evil" but a secret third thing (humans are inherently social animals which means that we're very good at cooperating and being compassionate towards those we perceive as being part of our community but we're also very good at being tribal and violent towards those we perceive as threats to our community and everyone defines their community differently)