labminion - Tumblr blog

[labminion]

job interviewer: ok thats all for me do you have any questions before we move on?

me: what if a dracula show up 😰

interviewer: omg fuck😖 no. just no.

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"Oh no! This resonance cascade has introduced hostile alien wildlife into the Black Mesa facility! How ever am I going to defend myself???" The humble crowbar:

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chillin on a Saturday night

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Fair warning: english is not my first language, feel free to point out any mistakes. Also this is a long post with a tl;dr at the end.

Okay, so I read the article and immediately became curious about what russia had to say about that. Because, I mean, spy whales sounds crazy, but I know my country. We have crazy in spades. And luckily for me, there is a handy wikipedia article on the subject in russian.

And its "Supposed origin" section is based on radio Svoboda's investigation on Hvaldimir. It's in russian, obviously, and if you're in Russia, you need a VPN to access it.

So here are its main points (you can probably check me with google translate):

There is an institute that specialises in technologies for "external and internal threat prevention" or Федеральное государственное унитарное предприятие «Государственный научно-исследовательский институт прикладных проблем» which I can roughly translate as "Federal Institute of applied problems". This is their website:

According to Bellingcat, this Institute was connected to Alexey Navalny's poisoning, but that's not very relevant

Anyway they are clearly military-espionage-government secrets adjacent: no english option on their website (which is not the norm for an institute), very very small amount of publications (or, rather, publically available ones), all their publications are in russian, and the ones we can see are about security systems and, suddenly. BELUGA WHALES. Here's Publications section on their website, look for word белуха:

The Institute is mainly in Moscow, but there's not a lot of places for a whale there, let alone several. According to their website, they have branches in Priozersk, Polyarny and Sochi, and the whales were kept first in Polyarny and, later, in Sochi.

It looks like they were training them to find specific objects or carry things maybe. Also they flied them in Sochi for 2014 Olympic games, presumably for like, finding bombs or divers or other underwater threats. And they helpfully wrote an article about transporting them! You can look it up in their Publications section on their website.

The Institute regularly bought food for them, but apparentely stopped after 2017. You can check their purchases on this website but i think you need a russian IP:

https://zakupki.gov.ru/epz/organization/view223/info.html?agencyId=8268

This is a screenshot from there, they bought some frozen fish.

Not gonna lie, I didn't check that there really weren't any fish purchases after 2017, bc there's like a hundred pages and I need to go to work, but I might check later and edit this.

Anyway Sochi-based whales were used as a tourist attraction so their food was probably bought with the money from ticket sales

But North-based whales are in Polyarny, closed military town, so no ticket money for them.

So where are they? Radio Svoboda guessed that Hvaldimir, possibly with other whates, escaped captivity and made his way to Norway shores. It might be true. Really, no spy agency would leave a collar with a home address on their spy animal.

Why did his harness say Equipment St. Petersburg though? Equipment (Снаряжение) is a St. Petersburg-based, well, equipment company - tents, backpacks and the like. Radio Svoboda claims that this symbol on the harness is the company's old logo. Today their logo is very modern, so I don't really know how to check that. But they do make custom stuff, so they could plausibly make a harness.

So. Are spy belugas real? Fucking whales? Spying? Russian spying whales? It certainly looks so. Fucking whales, man. Why does my country always sound like a comic book universe. Like, it's cartoonish, that's what it is. Fucking whales. And I'm not even that surprised.

tl;dr: Russia trains spy whales and Hvaldimir might have been one of them until he (probably) escaped captivity.

I am so confused

How and why would a beluga whale be a Russian spy. Ah yes let's use this conspicuous large marine mammal to gather intelligence on other nation's activities. Let's make sure the collar says "St. Petersburg" on it too. No one will ever notice our clearly labeled beluga whale intelligence operative

[labminion]

Yarn holder

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ITS WESLEY SNIPES BIRTHDAY HAPPY BIRTHAY BLADE I LOVE YOU SO MUCH

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she’s trying

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just had a stupid thought

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this has probably been done before but idc here's my rendition...

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-♡

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We Are Lady Parts really just. Had the most hauntingly beautiful version of Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood. I've had literal goosebumps. In. Sane. Faith Omole was IN.SANE.

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cant stop thinking about this video

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In the spirit of encouraging people to comment on fanfics while also making it easier to do so, I feel obliged to share a browser extension for ao3 that has quite literally revolutionized the comment game for me.

I present to you: the floating ao3 comment box!

From what I've seen, a big problem for many people is that once you reach the comments at the bottom of a fic, your memory of it miraculously disappears. Anything you wanted to say is stuck ten paragraphs ago, and you barely remember what you thought while reading. This fixes that!

I'll give a little explanation on the features and how it works, but if you want to skip all that, here's the link.

The extension is visible as a small blue box in the upper left corner.

(Side note: The green colouring is not from the extension, that's me.)

If you click on it, you open a comment box window at the bottom of your screen but not at the bottom of the fic. I opened my own fic for demonstrative purposes.

The website also gives explanations on how exactly it functions, but I'll summarize regardless.

insert selection -> if you highlight a sentence in the fic it will be added in italics to the comment box

add to comment box -> once you're done writing your comment, you click this button and the entire thing will automatically copied to the ao3 comment box

delete -> self explanatory

on mulitchapter fics, you will be given the option to either add the comment to just the current chapter or the entire fic

The best part? You can simply close the window the same way you opened it and your progress will automatically be saved. So you can open it, comment on a paragraph, and then close it and keep reading without having the box in your face.

Comments are what keep writers going, and as both a writer and a reader, I think it's such an easy way of showing support and enthusiasm.

[labminion]

Lovisa Lager by Ninja Hanna

[labminion]

Cat paws ♡ also, so if I'm making iruka time travel anyway for tobiruka (because, well, those who know me, surely you would suspect that as endgame if there is timetravelling iruka ;3) why not happen to stop by younger Naruto for a little bit of light kidnapping, yeah?

[labminion]

You know what I do in fact enjoy a handful of TSwift songs like actually genuinely and I feel like my biggest real issue with the rest of it is that 1. Every building in town plays all of it on a loop constantly and 2. The vast majority follow the same formulaic ABABA CCC structure with the same melancholy breakup tone and that is not my jam

"Do you think you could you do better?" Well no probably not but I've also never tried so who's to say