Reblogged
as;dkfna;sdfkasdf crying lmfao
Reblogged brilockhart
Anonymous asked:
why do you and others like vaccines so much?
not dying of preventable diseases is actually one of my favorite hobbies
Reblogged ekjohnston
nacho-joe-yo-deactivated2022012
Monster fucker this, monster fucker that. What if I want a monster RELATIONSHIP huh?! Monster HAND HOLDING, monster INTIMATE CONVERSATIONS, monster COMFORTABLE SILENCE??
Reblogged beeftony
so i spent far too long on this.
for those unaware, the spaghetti wall of letters and numbers is a base64-encoded JPEG image (and not a URL as some guessed). in certain cases when you tried to insert/paste an image into what’s ostensibly a text-only box, this could happen.
the thing that’s bugging me however is that there’s image data there. we have fairly a clear (albeit with JPEG artifacts) screenshot of text that, thanks to how Windows ClearType renders text, each character is identical to each other, that is to say, an uppercase Q will always look more or less pixel-perfect each time, meaning we don’t have to guess what a Q looks like, we simply have to pixel-accurate match it.
as an aside, this is why regular OCR struggles so much with this kind of data retrieval, such as code even when it’s clearer than a physical paper scan. ordinarily, OCR will try to best-guess every single letter because it expects each letter to be slightly different from each other (as would be the unpredictable nature in a scanned document), and on top of that most OCR today will try to autocorrect because it expects the scanned text to contain words in some human written language.
so, all we have to do is make a program to recognize each character and piece back together the whole base64 string, right? well…
first i stitched all 7 images back into a single block of text, observing the consistency of the line spacing. some of the screenshots have little bits of the previous one sticking out of it, which helps with alignment and to make sure they’re in the right order.
after that i had to sample every single letter off this file. this means going around the file and finding one example of each different character we’re trying to identify, saving it as its own separate file so that the program can load them as references to compare against in the full image. for base64, the alphabet consists of a-z, A-Z, 0-9, +, / and =. once i had the initial code in place…
…close! but oh so far. if any one single character in a base64 string is wrong or missing, the resulting decode will be wrong. the issues i was having were mostly with the lowercase r and j because of how the kerning affected the pixels around those letters. i was also getting false matches for r where there should be an m. what followed was grueling hours of tweaking the matching code and my known font set to better fit the original image and get as close as possible to a 100% match. here is the resulting code, maybe it’ll be useful for someone and this won’t have been a complete waste of time.
once i was confident through the verification image that i had all characters recognized, i put it through a base64 to JPEG decoder. i actually did this several times as i improved the recognition and what follows is the best result that came out of it yet. i suspect some of the data might be missing (perhaps a line or block of text got lost in between screenshots), or i have a wrong character somewhere resulting in a wrong value. this is the image extracted from OP’s base64 string:
we can finally know what they meant when they said “me in a relationship” and i can finally go the fuck to sleep.
update: i found that the string that i used to decode the image in the previous reblog actually had one letter wrong.
with this it still doesn’t parse as fully valid base64 in strict mode so i think there’s still another letter in there that’s wrong, but i couldn’t find it. however this gives us a better look:
and this is finally enough to do a reverse image search. i present to you, the HD version of our intrepid massive backpacker:
still have no idea what they mean by “me in a relationship” with that, though.
Reblogged ekjohnston
40,000 years ago, early humans painted hands on the wall of a cave. This morning, my baby cousin began finger painting. All of recorded history happened between these two paintings of human hands. The Nazca Lines and the Mona Lisa. The first TransAtlantic flight and the first voyage to the Moon. Humanity invented the wheel, the telescope, and the nuclear bomb. We eradicated wild poliovirus types 2 and 3. We discovered radio waves, dinosaurs, and the laws of thermodynamics. Freedom Riders crossed the South. Hippies burned their draft cards. Countless genocides, scientific advancements, migrations, and rebellions. More than a hundred billion humans lived and died between these two paintings—one on a sheet of paper, and one on the inside of a cave. At the dawn of time, ancient humans stretched out their hands. And this morning, a child reached back.
A Timeline of Humanity:
Bro this fr hit so hard
Reblogged ekjohnston
Justin Mays
Source: instagram.com
Reblogged ekjohnston
tbh no april fools gag tumblr ever pulls will ever be as good as the lizard election of 2016 staff put more effort into that than the rest of this website combined and it shows
cishetsbeingcishet
for those of you who werent here in 2016 on april fools that year the entire fucking website was transformed and there was an election for a position that wasnt even ever specified and the candidates were four lizards (or three lizards and a salamander as a scandal would later prove) and it was called decision2016
each lizard had their own 3d models and tumblr blog and campaign and there was also a tumblr blog dedicated to reporting on the election and they made like whole ass news broadcasts with a guy in front of a green screen
you could vote for your favorite candidate and there was a built-in function that let you make and post a campaign poster
in case anyone was wondering the winner of the election was mop. relatable and reliable. #Mop Could
lest we forget
This was absolutely the biggest April Fools effort I ever witnessed while on staff. I already posted about this in an ask but here’s more of the shit that went down behind the scenes.
- Like all April Fools, this was done entirely through volunteer work on Staff. No one was forced to work on April Fools, it’s always employee-initiated and driven, even if it needs approval from leadership.
- The prank almost didn’t go through because leadership felt that the lizards weren’t relatable enough, so the compromise was to give them hats.
- The video updates on the Decision 2016 blog were greenscreen Fiverr actors that were all recorded months? Weeks? in advance? I wasn’t on creative so I don’t know all the deets about how those were made.
- As mentioned in my post, the victory speech by Mop was one of our designers screaming as loud as she could in a closet near the end of the day. The full audio was never posted but staff kept passing around the scream on slack and laughing about it for months afterwards
- There was a “war room” dedicated to advancing the election narrative as votes came in, posting updates in real time and also pushing changes to code as necessary (for bug fixes and what not)
- The votes were real and the “election” was decided by real users, even if the graphics and whatnot were exaggerated for comical effect. Mop won because Mop won. Democracy at work
- Someone brought in their own lizard to celebrate the proceedings. It was a bearded dragon
- This was the culmination of what was probably the most cohesive and imaginative (and largest) creative team Tumblr ever had. Unfortunately almost all of them are now long gone, and Tumblr Creative is now just a skeleton crew compared to their peak
- Wretched Tooth Doesn’t Like To Talk About Himself
- People drew porn of the lizards and posted it on Tumblr. Staff saw it and were sending it to each other on the company Slack. We thought it was great. I mean, terrifying, but great
- This picture of David Karp is my favorite photo of David Karp I have on my phone
a whole chapter of my tumblr memoir will be “lizard election 2016”
it was the first project i ever led myself, and i thought i’d be fired for sure by the end of it. completely worth it. would do it all again.
my only regret, echoed by @zacksultan and a few of the other creatives, was that we didn’t get BuzzFeed and other press in the war room with us at the time. it was magical.
Reblogged
I love how immediately Gaoshun has to tell Maomao to stop treating Jinshi like a bug because he's being an absolute freak about it. He's like hey, I know we only met a week ago, but you've already given my insane boss a sexual complex and for all of our sakes you should probably try to avoid activating it
THESE TAGS HAVE NO RIGHT TO BE SO FUNNY AND SO CORRECT IM ON THE FLOOR
Reblogged
That's right folks! My next adult romance, IT HAD TO BE HIM, is coming your way September 2, 2025, and you can preorder now!! It's got another swanky illustration by Forouzan Safari!
About the book:
Ramin Yazdani's marriage proposal has just gone bottoms up: his ex dumped him in public for being boring. Bent on proving him wrong, Ramin books a spontaneous solo trip to Italy. When he runs into his high school crush while in a gelateria, however, his resolve to reinvent himself is put to the test.
Noah Bartlett’s in a rut. Since his divorce, he's become a bit of a homebody. So when his ex-wife insists he join her and their son on an Italian holiday, Noah reluctantly agrees. But his reticence turns to excitement when he sees his former classmate, who's aged just like a fine wine. As a teenager, Ramin fascinated him—and since Noah now knows that fascination was code for crush, all those feelings are quick to come rushing back. Soon Ramin and Noah are tumbling headfirst into a relationship. Only Ramin fears Noah’s feelings won’t last without Ramin’s adventurous new persona—and Noah's not sure he can be the supportive partner Ramin deserves. With the days counting down to the end of their trip, can their love last without the magic of Italy?
