#was very speechless

[soldrawss]

Watching and Dreaming doodles cause im 🥺🥰

[mecachrome]

oscar and lando trying to say the same word (and oscar being terrible at it)

[ravangie]

ok ok ok ok ok

It's my Birthday today, I'm the Birthday Girl, that's me🥰

And my dearest friend gifted this to me:

An ENTIRELY HAND-MADE replica of a puzzle from a hit video game "Nancy Drew: Shadow at the Water's Edge"

This is a treasure. That belongs to me only. One of a kind.

[mcavoy-girl]

[linkyu]

tell me about your defense contract pleage

Oh boy!

To be fair, it's nothing grandiose, like, it wasn't about "a new missile blueprint" or whatever, but, just thinking about what it could have become? yeesh.

So, let's go.

For context, this is taking place in the early 2010s, where I was working as a dev and manager for a company that mostly did space stuff, but they had some defence and security contracts too.

One day we got a new contract though, which was... a weird one. It was state-auctioned, meaning that this was basically a homeland contract, but the main sponsor was Philip Morris. Yeah. The American cigarette company.

Why? Because the contract was essentially a crackdown on "illegal cigarette sales", but it was sold as a more general "war on drugs" contract.

For those unaware (because chances are, like me, you are a non-smoker), cigarette contraband is very much a thing. At the time, ~15% of cigarettes were sold illegally here (read: they were smuggled in and sold on the street).

And Phillip Morris wanted to stop that. After all, they're only a small company worth uhhh... oh JFC. Just a paltry 150 billion dollars. They need those extra dollars, you understand?

Anyway. So they sponsored a contract to the state, promising that "the technology used for this can be used to stop drug deals too". Also that "the state would benefit from the cigarettes part as well because smaller black market means more official sales means a higher tax revenue" (that has actually been proven true during the 2020 quarantine).

Anyway, here was the plan:

Phase 1 was to train a neural network and plug it in directly to the city's video-surveillance system, in order to detect illegal transactions as soon as they occur. Big brother who?

Phase 2 was to then track the people involved in said transaction throughout the city, based on their appearance and gait. You ever seen the Plainsight sheep counting video? Imagine something like this but with people. That data would then be relayed to police officers in the area.

So yeah, an automated CCTV-based tracking system. Because that's not setting a scary precedent.

So what do you do when you're in that position? Let me tell you. If you're thrust unknowingly, or against your will, into a project like this,

Note. The following is not a legal advice. In fact it's not even good advice. Do not attempt any of this unless you know you can't get caught, or that even if you are caught, the consequences are acceptable. Above all else, always have a backup plan if and when it backfires. Also don't do anything that can get you sued. Be reasonable.

Let me introduce you to the world of Corporate Sabotage! It's a funny form of striking, very effective in office environments.

Here's what I did:

First of all was the training data. We had extensive footage, but it needed to be marked manually for the training. Basically, just cropping the clips around the "transaction" and drawing some boxes on top of the "criminals". I was in charge of several batches of those. It helped that I was fast at it since I had video editing experience already. Well, let's just say that a good deal of those markings were... not very accurate.

Also, did you know that some video encodings are very slow to process by OpenCV, to the point of sometimes crashing? I'm sure the software is better at it nowadays though. So I did that to another portion of the data.

Unfortunately the training model itself was handled by a different company, so I couldn't do more about this.

Or could I?

I was the main person communicating with them, after all.

Enter: Miscommunication Master

In short (because this is already way too long), I became the most rigid person in the project. Like insisting on sharing the training data only on our own secure shared drive, which they didn't have access to yet. Or tracking down every single bug in the program and making weekly reports on those, which bogged down progress. Or asking for things to be done but without pointing at anyone in particular, so that no one actually did the thing. You know, classic manager incompetence. Except I couldn't be faulted, because after all, I was just "really serious about the security aspect of this project. And you don't want the state to learn that we've mishandled the data security of the project, do you, Jeff?"

A thousand little jabs like this, to slow down and delay the project.

At the end of it, after a full year on this project, we had.... a neural network full of false positives and a semi-working visualizer.

They said the project needed to be wrapped up in the next three months.

I said "damn, good luck with that! By the way my contract is up next month and I'm not renewing."

Last I heard, that city still doesn't have anything installed on their CCTV.

tl;dr: I used corporate sabotage to prevent automated surveillance to be implemented in a city--

hey hold on

wait

what

HEY ACTUALLY I DID SOME EXTRA RESEARCH TO SEE IF PHILLIP MORRIS TRIED THIS SHIT WITH ANOTHER COMPANY SINCE THEN AND WHAT THE FUCK

HUH??????

well what the fuck was all that even about then if they already own most of the black market???

[utterlyazriel]

azriel with a mate who’s messy enough they always manage to have something scruffy with their clothing— a collar untucked, a tag poking out, a belt twisted around at the back.

azriel always adores how they never seem to notice. he adores even more the chance to get closer to his love, always silently and politely tucking in tags or smoothing out wrinkles without being asked to — loving how his mate jumps in surprise at his touch but it soothes away into affection in half a moment when they realise who it is <3

[autiezo]

JEAN V. - I’ve got a new game. It’s called Coupris Kineema or Shitkid. I give you real things I’ve heard Kitsuragi say, and you have to tell me if he was talking to his car or his boyfriend.

KIM K. - Don't.

HARRY D.B. - Both, the answer is always both. And I'm honoured.

KIM - ... khm.

HARRY - I won your lame game, Jean

JEAN - .

[mhaynoot]

reminding myself daily that canonically gpd and hsy both got isekai’d together into peaceland because one fell into the han river and the other got hit by a fucking bus

[raven-delamuerte]

"Romance and Horror cannot coexist"

Ma'am, this is the Addams Family you're talking about. Please read the source material 😭🙏

[theerastour]

LOOK at this thrift store find omg

[meownotgood]

Hey, just so you know, the person who plagiarized your work hasn't actually deleted their ao3 but changed it to sugucidal. While looking through my one fic I know they commented on it showed up like that. Figured you'd want to know so you can still block them.

oh wow. the saga continues apparently because every single one of the fics this account has ever posted were stolen from me. like.... I'm not sure what could compel a person to do this....

[moeblob]

Ananza realizing that Deacon's mom was a devoted follower of hers THEREFORE that's her son now, too! And she will dote on him and love him and never pick on him like all the other deities tend to do. That's her precious little boy who lives in another city and rarely gets to see her!

[fishareglorious]

(not pictured: the rest of Rayashki with Vila)

this comment on my shitpost art compelled me to make this.

[femgoddess-hecate]

Just saw an insta post that was like:

Me as a young girl: *praying to god to make me a boy so I could marry a girl*

Me now: *is genderfluid*

And it's like.....you Didn't escape. You're still In It. The shackles of god weigh on you even now. Your internalized misogyny and lesbophobia convinced you that god was right all along. You Fell For It.

[lovemkx]

Miles Kane for GQ Türkiye

one / two - interview

[pigswithwings]

This is so rush and my apologies if this is unwanted but hear me out, since we have a V1 and V2 plushies the masses deserve a Mirage one so may I offer one during these trying times-

Quite Possibly The Greatest Gift I Have Ever Recieved