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[youweremovingyourfeet]

meow meow

you can get a print here

[youweremovingyourfeet]

GUYS ?!?!?!?!!

[youweremovingyourfeet]

Move To A Darker Place

This is a story of Man Vs. Machine.

---

Last March, my father attempted to file his Taxes.

My beloved father is a Boomer. Unlike most Boomers, my father is rather handy with technology because he was one of the people that had a not-insignificant hand in Developing a hell of a lot of it. He was studying Computer Science at Cal Poly before the computer science degree existed. I have many fond childhood memories of skipping through the aisles of various electronic and computer part warehouses while Dad described something that either terrified the staff or made them worship him as a God.  He taught himself how to use his smartphone.  Internationally.

So when he saw the option to file digitally with the IRS through the “ID.me” program, he leapt at the chance to celebrate the Federal Government finally entering the Digital Age.

It was all going swimmingly for about six hours, until he was ready to file and the system told him that it needed to verify his identity. 

“Very Well.” said my father, a man unafraid of talking to himself and getting something out of the conversation. “It wouldn’t do for me to get someone else’s return.”

The System told him that it needed him to take a “Digital Image ID”.

a.k.a: A Selfie.

“A-ha!” Dad beams. Dad is very good at taking selfies. He immediately pulled out his phone, snapped one, and tried to upload it.

Please log into your Id.me Account and use the provided app to submit your Digital Image ID. The System clarified.

“Oh. You should have said so.”  Dad pouted, but used his phone to log onto the ID.me account, do the six security verification steps and double-checked that the filing looked the same as it did on the desktop, gave the IRS like nine permissions on his phone, and held up the camera to take his Federal Privacy Invasion Selfie.

Please align your face to the indicated grid. Said The System, pulling up a futuristic green-web-of-polygons approximation.

“Ooh, very Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry would HATE this!” Dad said cheerfully, aligning his face to the grid.  My father is a bit… cavalier, when it comes to matters of personal information and federal government, because he’s been on FBI watchlists since the late 60’s when he was protesting The Vietnam War and Ronald Regan before he’d broken containment. Alas.

Anyway, there is very little information the federal government does not have on him already, but he’s as good at stalking the FBI as they are at stalking him, and had worked out a solution:  He has something approaching a friendship with the local Federal Agent (Some guy named “Larry”. Allegedly), and got Larry hooked on Alternative Histories and Dad’s collection of carefully-researched “there is very likely buried treasure here” stories, and Larry is loath to bother his favorite Historical Fanfiction author too much.

But I digress.

After thinking for a minute, The System came back with an Error Message. Please remove glasses or other facial obstructions.

And here is where the real trouble began.

See, my father wears glasses that do substantially warp the appearance of his face, because he is so nearsighted that he is legally blind without them. His natural focal point is about 4 inches in front of his nose.  While Dad can still take a selfie because he (approximately) knows where his phone is if it’s in his hand, he cannot see the alignment grid.

He should ask someone to take it for him! I hear the audience say. Yes, that would be the sane and reasonable thing to do, but Dad was attempting to do taxes at his residence in Fort Collins, while his immediate family was respectively in Denver, Texas and Canada.  He tried calling our neighbors, who turned out to be in Uganda.

He looked down at the dog, Arwen, and her little criminal paws that can open doorknobs, but not operate cell phones.

She looked back at him, and farted.

“Well, I’ll give it a try, but if it gives me too much trouble, I’ll call Larry, and Larry can call the IRS about it.” Dad told her. 

She continued to watch him. Arwen is an Australian Kelpie (a type of cattle-herding dog), going on 14 years old, deaf as a post and suffering from canine dementia now, but she still retains her natural instinct to Micromanage. She was also trained as a therapy dog, and even if she can’t hear my dad, still recognizes the body language of a man setting himself up for catastrophe.

So, squinting in the late afternoon light next to the back door, Dad attempted to line his face up with a grid he could only sort-of see, and took A Federal Selfie.

The System thought about it for a few moments.

Image Capture Failed: Insufficient Contrast. The System replied. Please move to a darker place.

“...Huh.” Dad frowned. “Alright.”

He moved to the middle of his office, away from the back door, lit only by the house lighting and indirect sunlight, and tried again.

Image Capture Failed. Please move to a darker place.

“What?” Dad asked the universe in general.

“Whuff.” Arwen warned him against sunk costs.

Dad ignored her and went into the bathroom, the natural habitat of the selfie. Surely, only being lit by a light fixture that hadn’t been changed since Dad was attempting to warn everyone about Regan would be suitably insufficient lighting for The System.  It took some negotiating, because that bathroom is “Standing Room Only” not “Standing And Holding Your Arms Out In Front Of You Room”.  He ended up taking the selfie in the shower stall.

As The System mulled over the latest attempt, Arwen shuffled over and kicked open the door to watch.

Image Capture Failed. Please Move to a Darker Place.

“Do you mean Spiritually?” Dad demanded.

“Whuff.” Arwen cautioned him again.

Determined to succeed, or at least get a different error message that may give him more information, Dad entered The Downstairs Guest Room.  It is the darkest room in the house, as it is in the basement, and only has one legally-mandated-fire-escape window, which has blinds.  Dad drew those blinds, turned off the lights and tried AGAIN.

Image Capture Failed. Please Move To A Darker Place.

“DO YOU WANT ME TO PHOTOGRAPH MYSELF INSIDE OF A CAVE??” Dad howled. 

“WHUFF!” Arwen reprimanded him from under the pull-out bed in the room. It’s where she attempts to herd everyone when it’s thundering outside, so the space is called her ‘Safety Cave’.

Dad frowned at the large blurry shape that was The Safety Cave.

“Why not?” he asked, the prelude to many a Terrible Plan.  With no small amount of spiteful and manic glee, Dad got down onto the floor, and army-crawled under the bed with Arwen to try One Last Time. Now in near-total darkness, he rolled on his side to be able to stretch his arms out, Arwen slobber-panting in his ear, and waited for the vague green blob of the Facial grid to appear.

This time, when he tapped the button, the flash cctivated.

“GOD DAMN IT!” Dad shouted, dropping the phone and rubbing his eyes and cursing to alleviate the pain of accidentally flash-banging himself. Arwen shuffled away from him under the bed, huffing sarcastically at him.

Image Capture Failed. Please move to a darker place.

“MOTHERFU- hang on.” Dad squinted.  The System sounded strange. Distant and slightly muffled.

Dad squinted really hard, and saw the movement of Arwen crawling out from under the bed along the phone’s last known trajectory.

“ARWEN!” Dad shouted, awkwardly reverse-army crawling out from under the bed, using it to get to his feet and searching for his glasses, which had fallen out of his pocket under the bed, so by the time he was sighted again, Arwen had had ample time to remove The Offending Device.

He found her out in the middle of the back yard, the satisfied look of a Job Well Done on her face. She did not have the phone. 

“Arwen.” Dad glared. It’s a very good glare. Dad was a teacher for many years and used it to keep his class in order with sheer telepathically induced embarrassment, and his father once glared a peach tree into fecundity.  

Arwen regarded him with the casual interest a hurricane might regard a sailboat tumbling out of its wake. She is a force of nature unto herself and not about to be intimidated by a half-blind house ape.  She also has cataracts and might not be able to make out the glare.

“I GIVE UP!” Dad shouted, throwing his hands in the air and returning to the office to write to the IRS that their selfie software sucks ass. Pleased that she had gotten her desired result, Arwen followed him in.

To Dad’s immense surprise, the computer cheerfully informed him that his Federally Secure Selfie had been accepted, and that they had received and were now processing his return!

“What the FUCK?” Dad glared. “Oh well. If I’ve screwed it up, Larry can call me.”

---

I bring this up because recently, Dad received an interesting piece of mail.

It was a letter from the IRS, addressed to him, a nerve-wracking thing to recessive at the best of times.  Instead of a complaint about Dad’s Selfie Skills, it was a letter congratulating him on using the new ID.me System.  It thanked him for his help and expressed hopes he would use it again next year, and included the selfie that The System had finally decided to accept.

“You know, my dad used to complain about automation.” Dad sighed, staring at the image. “Incidentals my boy!  My secretary saves the state of California millions of dollars a year catching small errors before they become massive ones! He’d say. Fought the human resources board about her pay every year.  I used to think he was overestimating how bad machines were and underestimating human error, but you know? He was right.”

He handed me the image.

My father was, technically, in the image.  A significant amount of the bottom right corner is taken up by the top of his forehead and silver hair.  Most of the image, the part with the facial-recognition markers on it, was composed of Arwen’s Alarmed and Disgusted Doggy face.

“Oh no!” I cackled. “Crap, does this mean you have to call the IRS and tell them you’re not a dog?”

“Probably.” Dad sighed. “I know who I’m gonna bother first though.” he said, taking out his phone (Dad did find his phone a few hours after Arwen absconded with it when mom called and the early spinach started ringing). 

“Hey Larry!” Dad announced to the local federal agent. “You’re never gonna believe this. My dog filed my taxes!”

Larry considered this for a moment. “Is this the dog that stole my sandwich? Out of my locked  car?” he asked suspiciously.

“The very same.” Dad grinned.

“Hm. Clever Girl.” Federal Agent Larry sighed. “I figured it was only a matter of time before she got into tax fraud.”

---

If you enjoy my stories, please consider supporting me on Ko-fi or Pre-ordering my Family Lore Book on Patreon. Thank you!

[youweremovingyourfeet]

[youweremovingyourfeet]

Weeping at this. Frighteningly similar to how I sound

[youweremovingyourfeet]

I used to do cross country in high school, and there was this guy on the team that was wonderful. Great guy. But his advice to everyone that asked how to get good was to run 20k a day.

If you don't run, I'll just tell you, most people's bodies cannot take that kind of abuse. No matter how much you train, you will not be able to run 20k a day. It's like how you can't train to make your cuts heal faster. You recover as fast as you recover. So while a big part of what made this guy so succesful was the dedication and mental toughness needed to actually run 20k a day, an equally big part was that he healed like fucking Wolverine. And that's fine, but it would've been nice if he knew that and stopped telling new guys to commit suicide by jogging.

Different guy on the team ran like, 5-6k a day, which actually isn't all that much. His problem when he gave advice was that he didn't really get that 5-6k a day doesn't generally produce elite results for most people. He was lucky in the sense that he didn't have to work all that hard to get great results, and unlucky in the sense that if he pushed himself much further than that, he fell apart.

I think about those two whenever I get advice from succesful people. The very things that make them outliers also make their advice useless to most people. Worse, they're often outliers on totally separate ends of the same spectrum, so their advice will be contradictory.

[youweremovingyourfeet]

a few years back my car insurance company offered me a discount if i stuck a dongle in my car that would tell them how i drive (specifically reporting hard accelerations and stops), with a base discount of 10% even if i drive like a madman up to 40%ish if i drive like a grandma. and of course naturally my first thought was "huh i bet i could make something running off an Arduino that filters hard brakes and accelerations out of the incoming data stream to get that 40% discount" and i got as far as looking up OBD2 protocols before realizing that that would just be insurance fraud. yes im an engineer raised by two engineers how could you tell

[youweremovingyourfeet]

[youweremovingyourfeet]

When you spend a semester abroad and then can’t help peppering in the new language you learned into everyday speech…

[youweremovingyourfeet]

i could not prevent it

[youweremovingyourfeet]

tell me, tell me how to be a lily, if you know.

[youweremovingyourfeet]

thinking about when i was small, how my mom told me that pipe cleaners were just a tool until people started idly shaping things with them and it grew so popular that they were marketed as crafting materials. and that story about how the original frisbees were disposable pie plates that students flattened to throw. and how when i was a child i had a wooden mancala set with shiny, colorful stones, but on invention it was played with rocks and grooves dug into the dirt. and middle school, paper football and tic-tac-toe and mash and mad libs, games that just need pen and paper. and before that, games of pretend with pirates and princes and masked marauders. how at slumber parties after lights out, we used to whisper storytelling games, i say one sentence and you say the next. and shadow puppets. and the way all the kids in the neighborhood used to divide into teams and throw fallen pine cones at one another. and the floor is lava game, and the quiet game, and the games i play with my coworkers that are just words and retention. and "put a finger down" on the high school bus. and little girls clapping together, and how the first jump-rope was undoubtedly just a length of rope who knows how long ago, and how natural it is to play, how we seek play at every age and with any resources we have and with whatever time we can squeeze it into in a day. i'm not an anthropologist or a psychologist but i think after food and shelter and water and air what comes next is games and stories and laughter. i think that there is nothing -- not sex or fighting or forming unlikely bonds with animals -- there is nothing more human than to play.

[youweremovingyourfeet]

New: Search operators for better searching!

We hear you, and we share your frustrations: it’s hard to find a specific post. You know it has a particular tag or phrase, and it was posted on this date, or at least, within a specific year. But you can't find it!

So, today, we’re excited to announce that you can use ✨ advanced search operators ✨ in the search bar now! You can now say potato from:staff year:2021 to easily enjoy that video of a potato being microwaved again.

Before we jump into the details, a couple of caveats to note:

These search operators are only available in the main Tumblr search bar. They don’t work in the search bar in individual blogs.

The search operators only work on posts created in 2017 or later.

OK! Let’s go explore these operators!

Exact phrase match

When you surround your query with regular double quotes (not curly quotes), it will match posts with that exact phrase in the post's text content, or that exact phrase as a tag.

For example, "chappell roan is roan of arc" matches posts with that exact phrase in the content, and also matches posts that have the exact tag #chappell roan is roan of arc.

Match operator

By default, the query matches the post on either the text or the tags.

You can use match:text to specify you want to search the post content, or match:tags to search the post tags. For example:

sword world match:text looks for posts with the words "sword" and "world" in the post content.

sword world match:tags looks for posts with the words "sword" and "world" in the post tags.

From operator

Use from:blog or from:@​blog to find only posts by a particular blog.

For example, halloween from:staff finds all posts by @staff that has the word "halloween" in the post content or tags.

Year operator

Use year:YYYY to find posts from a particular year.

For example, halloween year:2019 finds all posts from 2019 that has the word "halloween" in the post content or tags.

Date operator

Use date:YYYY-MM-DD to find posts from a particular date.

For example, halloween date:2019-10-08 finds all posts created on October 8, 2019 that has the word "halloween" in the post content or tags.

All together

You can combine all the tools above to form even more specific queries:

Congrats! You’re now a Tumblr search wizard! 🪄

Other syntax

As a reminder, you can already search by a tag, or by multiple tags:

Prefixing your query with # performs a tag search — that is, it will find posts with that exact tag. For example, #star wars will only return posts with the #star wars tag.

You can search for multiple tags at at time. For example, #star wars #art will find posts that are tagged with both the tag #star wars and the tag #art.

You can combine this with the new operators to find what you are looking for!

We will add a guide for this new syntax soon to our Help Center.

Tumblr Patio support

The enhanced syntax makes Tumblr Patio even more powerful. You can now open multiple search columns each with different fine-tuned queries that use the syntax above to get you customized feeds.

Feedback

We’d love to hear what you think! Please share your feedback in the replies and reblogs of this post, or by reaching out to Tumblr Support.

[youweremovingyourfeet]