Iwillforgettoaddanything

when it's on cable, they've timed the commercial breaks in a way that generally isn't as disruptive. someone took the time to "reformat" the movie for tv.

ads on poob always KNOW that they're on poob and want me to interact with them or click them. the number of QR codes or ads-in-separate-ad-framing/window are infuriating and jarring.

cable commercials are just stupid little skits i can mute to go use the bathroom.

ads on poob are less than 2 minutes--not enough time to do anything, but enough time to piss me off.

cable commercials are 2-5 minutes, which is enough time to go do something/bathroom or snack break, or talk to whoever you're watching with.

ads on poob are the same 3-4 commercials over and over and over and over again, often cutting to them immediately with no warning, and poob struggles to like, catch up to the fact that it's having to show a different progress bar, or a different timer.

cable commercials, esp during primetime, generally cycle through like 10-15 minimum, so you can go an ad break or two without seeing the same commercial. and they usually only pop up during quiet moments, at regular intervals, so you can see them coming--and there isn't a weird lag/loading time.

in both cases i am being accosted by advertisements and treated like a consumer to manipulate and exploit. the volume changes on cable and poob, the brightness level is eye-searing in both cases.

but poob doesn't respect that i'm here for the MOVIE. cable, thanks to preexisting, decades-old norms around broadcast television, still kind of does. kind of. it's easier to ignore those commercials than the ones on poob.

like, this bog body looking motherfucker could have been our sith apprentice. we could have had THIS instead of Darth Thot. and i for one am thankful that george was too scared of this design to go through with it.

Here's mccaig's recount of when he showed that design to george too:

Enter my mostly black demon who likes to jump out of dark spaces at me.

Movement out of the corner of your eye? Cat.

Objects moved? Cat.

Inexplicable smells? Cat.

Corpses (small)? Cat.

go away? Nah. They just make

you stop being scared.

I mean. It’s rainbow. On a black background. Of course I’m gonna want some LOL

Anyway, decided to do a two colour quilt again and to keep it simple. I needed a break to just throw something together without thinking too hard about it.

So, a modified nine patch and snowball with sashing it is.

A little bit of layout to see how I like it.

And a couple rows sewed.

The fabric is directional, which was a little bit of a pain to make everything go in the right orientation, but tis very pleasing to look at :D

I didn’t think the black was gonna look quite so dark, but I auditioned several background colours including navy and forest green, but the black was the ultimate winner.

The black was indeed the best choice for the background, it’s plain and doesn’t take anything away from the mushroom fabric.

I did not trim away the underneath snowball corners like I normally would, and it didn’t bother my machine at home to piece, or the long arm, so I think I may leave those more often instead of wasting time trimming those tiny triangles off.

I found a gorgeous multicoloured hexagon print on a black background and had to use it. It’s fabulous.

An autistic man with a special interest in the Harry Potter series has made the decision to value the lives and dignity of his trans friends more than a book about a wizard who grows up to be a cop, leaving you with no excuse whatsoever to keep wearing that Hufflepuff scarf, sources have reported.

Jack Harrington, 38, grew up reading the popular children’s stories, and soon developed an intense fascination with the world of the books, including knowing all about the suspiciously depicted money-hungry goblins, and that one time it was revealed that slavery is commonplace and accepted in the wizarding world.

In spite of this, however, Harrington has recently worked to redirect his interest towards media created by someone less troublingly focused on his friends’ genitalia.

“It was hard to do,” Harrington said. “I really love collecting things, and there’s so much merchandise to collect! But once I realised that it’s possible to collect things in a way that doesn’t make it harder for my mates to go for a piss when out and about, it really was a no-brainer.”

Until one day Percy gets cursed, taking a blow for Nico, and it terrifies Nico out of his mind.

senior logistics strategist at Hewlett Packard. $140,000 / year. requirements: three separate MBAs, fifteen years of business experience, no "ethnic" grandparents, unearned sense of confidence

"customer success ambassador" at Glurp. $70,000 / year, give or take, since 90% of your pay is based on commission. requirements: associate's degree, no experience, has never heard the phrase "pyramid scheme," no sense of shame

I’m sorry but that’s thinking way too small, hear me out:

We need to have Miss Piggy as Odysseus, and Kermit as Penelope.

Think about it… who’s the more fickle, prideful, warlike one in that relationship? Who is absolutely ready to go ham, at a moment’s notice?

For me today, those circumstances were: Several days of being underslept. Over-stressed. Forgot to take my ADHD meds this morning. Already dealing with the harried mental state of day-before-travel stress. A personal panic trigger of missing appointments because I forgot about them.

We all know by now that the IRS will not call you on the phone. The jury duty people also will not call you on the phone, and this was the crucial piece of information that I did not have cold hard confirmation of today. Here is what happened, so that you can be equipped in case these fuckers call you:

Man with an American accent tells me he's from my city's courthouse. He tells me I missed jury duty summons yesterday and that now I'm in Trouble for contempt of court and failure to appear for jury duty. I protested that I hadn't gotten a notification for jury duty, he talked over me and said scary things about getting law enforcement involved unless I went to pay some fines and talk to the judge Right Now Today. He told me that I legally wasn't allowed to hang up the phone or put it on mute. He told me that I was under a "gag order" and I couldn't tell anyone about this except law enforcement or immediate family members. He already knew my address. He had official-sounding case numbers which he made me write down and repeat back to him. He had official addresses of where I needed to go and what I needed to do: Take the cash for my "fines" to a kiosk where I would pay them and receive a "voucher" that i would then take to the courthouse where I would supposedly speak to a judge. He told me again that if I hung up the phone before I got to the courthouse, it would be taken as obstruction or failure to comply or intent to flee and he would notify the police. He told me that if I went to sort it out with the judge, it might be waived and my money would be refunded.

I have not gotten jury duty summons for a WHILE -- since before the pandemic -- and I had been idly thinking recently that maybe I was due for one. So I heard all this and my panic button about Forgetting/Missing An Appointment got hit dead-on.

I panicked, I was upset and frantic, I was not thinking clearly. This is how they fucking get you.

Honestly, thank god he wanted me to take cash to a different location instead of giving him any financial information over the phone. Thank GOD for that, because it gave my nervous system 30 minutes or so to calm down and my higher brain functions to come back online so that I could notice that there were simply too many red flags in one interaction. I did go to my bank, I did withdraw quite a lot of money in cash.

The address he gave me to go to next was for a gas station. When I expressed confusion, the scammer had smooth explanations, and before I'd even parked, he'd texted me some glossy "official" looking infographics on how to use the kiosk and why the """government""" had started doing payments this way (supposedly a COVID measure, and because the funds were 'safer' or something). The kiosk, these infographic images said, was run by a company called BTC Tech, which they claimed was "Bailing Institute & Technologies". You will notice that that does not match the acronym. The infographic was full of grammatical errors, and thank god he had me sit there in my car and read the whole thing out loud "to make sure i understood it" so that I could hear myself vocally trip over every single one of those grammatical errors and think "Wow, this is weird, it wasn't proofread?"

He sent me a QR code for the ""kiosk"" which had a familiar logo on it. He had persistently asked me for my ETA to the next location, and he was pressuring me to get out of the car and go inside to the kiosk, and it was at this point that I started lying and said, "Sure, hang on one second, i have a pebble in my shoe or something I need to fix first" while I was googling "Bitcoin logo" to verify.

Didn't really need to verify because when I went inside, the only "kiosk" looking thing was an ATM looking thing that had "BITCOIN" written on it in very loud letters. Which brings us to one of two admittedly hilarious interactions, wherein i was standing there in front of the fucking bitcoin machine with my eyes narrowed going, "This is for Bitcoin" several times while he said "No no no no it's not, it's not bitcoin, it's BTC tech" and I kept saying "Well but it says Bitcoin on it in big letters." "No no, it's just a multi-currency system, it's for the courthouse, you have to get the voucher." "Ok but it's fucking BITCOIN, this feels like a scam, I don't think the government uses BITCOIN."

I walked out. I went back to my car. I told him that I wasn't comfortable, and that I needed to call the courthouse to verify with them what the charges were, or I needed to go in person to the courthouse to check what was up. He told me if I hung up, I'd be arrested, and if I stepped foot on government property, I'd be arrested.

It was at this point that I utilized a weapon which in many cases is very dangerous and unethical to use but hey, it's perfect for situations like this: White Lady* Tears. This is exactly the situation they're MEANT for -- buying yourself time to think when a man is strongarming you into meek obedience and fear. (* I am nonbinary but he didn't need to know that.)

Anyway I pretended to cry and told him i felt nauseous and that i was going to be sick and i was just uwu so fwightened and upset and uwu uwu uwu sob sob i felt like he was getting mad at me and it was so scawy oh woe oh no -- while this happened he texted me an arrest warrant that had one of my old roommates' names on it instead of mine, but that EPIC FUMBLE didn't even matter because the whole time I am frantically googling on my phone "jury duty scam" and finding a Reddit page from a guy who posted about the exact same thing happening to him.

I hung up. I called the courthouse, got patched through to the jury pool department, and as soon as the guy picked up, I said, "Hi, my name is Alex, I just got a call saying that I missed jury duty--" and before I could even finish the sentence, the guy said, "That was a scam, we will NEVER call you." I said thank god thank god oh fuck thank god, which brings me to the second hilarious moment of this escapade, where the jury duty guy cheerfully said, "But if you have a couple thousand dollars on you, you can come over and give them to me if you want!" which did make me burst out laughing. Thank you, jury duty guy, for that much-needed moment of levity. I hope you're having a good day.

You are not immune to social engineering. I am 36 years old, highly intelligent, educated, and VERY tech-savvy, and those fuckers STILL caught me at just the right moment and with just the right hook that it triggered panic and desperation and shame and guilt and overrode my critical thinking skills for a solid 30 minutes. If it happened to me, it could happen to you. BE FUCKING VIGILANT. THE IRS WILL NEVER CALL YOU, AND JURY DUTY WILL NEVER CALL YOU.

In hindsight, I'm actually glad that it played out the way it did. For one thing, as a life lesson, that was a pretty cheap one -- all that it cost me was about an hour of my life (including the time it took to go back to the bank and deposit the money I'd withdrawn, gossip extensively to the bank teller about what happened, and get home) and some grey hairs.

For another thing, that fucker spent all that time on the phone with me and didn't get my money. I snatched his smug asshole victory right out of his mouth at the last second and wasted his time -- time that he otherwise ould have spent scamming someone who might not have gotten over their panic in time.

I actually wish that I'd kept him on the phone longer, tbh. If I'd been less rattled, I bet I could have strung him along for another hour or two. Better he spend it with me than with someone else.

The scammers even had a setup where they "transferred" the call around. It was impressive, and they were prepared for questions about badge numbers, supervisor names, etc.

In hindsight, so much about the call was absurd -- that we were under surveillance, an arrest would automatically happen if we set foot in the police department, the need to go to a "self-serve bail kiosk", the refusal to allow anyone else on the line (the scammers did NOT want my partner to tell me anything).

I have read about this scam a million times.

But in the moment, it was incredibly intense. I only got a taste of it, too, when my partner passed me the phone. Even if you sense a red flag, you are not given a moment to examine it. So many scammer tactics are straight out of the abuser handbook: high urgency, authoritative voice, a barrage of instructions to follow. They want you scared and confused.

Even if you know, "the cops don't call", resisting this sort of thing takes practice!

I used to talk to a lot of cops in my old job, which is what helped me push back -- the minute I chastised the "officer" for being so jargon-heavy and not talking like a real person (something I did often at that old job), I was able to snap out of the scammer's spell and do a sanity check.

But if I had been a little poorer, a little more depressed, or things timed closer to my old legal troubles w/forgotten citations, I may have fallen for it.

I am with OP: You are not immune to social engineering. In fact, the more you think you are immune, the more you are likely suspectible.

Bobbin lace.