Fuck this job man, I sentenced this guy called Theseus to life in prison for murder and then I get a call from the prison that he has systematically replaced every organ in his body including his brain and is now claiming he is not the same person who committed the crime. They are letting him go free, fuck this. Worst of all is he also then took all of the parts that he discarded and made a second Theseus who is also claiming he did not commit the crime and they are also being let free. Now there's two of them out there and you just KNOW they are murdering people and then having gay sex. I fucking quit man...

(via @luimnigh )

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.

#they have baggage

This post came up in conversation once and I tried to google and find it but every variation on the caption I typed in made google hit me with their "hey man, maybe stop searching for racist memes" followed by 10,000 explicitly racist memes and, crucially, not this post. While I am glad this is a feature google has, it definitely did not help me find this post (which is not racist) but it did show me a lot memes (that were on purpose racist)

yesterday I had the thought "visual novel for normal people" (?) and halfway through making this image (which I thought would be really funny) I realized it was completely meaningless

yeah lemme go drop 1 silver on a potion instead of getting forcefemmed by lamias for free that sounds smart

boys will say they "know a spot" and then take you to the Serpent Caverns where all the lamias have a grab attack that stuns you while they put you in a cute dress and forcefem you. and she'll tell you she "comes here often to be myself" and it's like girl. gender change potions are 1 silver. there has to be a better way.

i don't really have the words for it but i'd come home from school and watch my mom sort our mail - junk, junk, junk, bills, junk. it used to pile up on our counter; day after day. i remember how much of it went right into the recycling bin.

email was huge when it really started being available to us all. i know that's wild to say to someone who was raised after AOL but "checking your email" used to be a big deal. i now have 2,521 unread messages; and that's after a deep clean last january. most of it is just spam. it just sits in my inbox, unanswered and unopened - draining whatever arbitrary amount of digital space i have in this world.

i don't check my voicemail, it's usually a scammer. i don't check my instagram notifications either - half of them are someone trying to sell me something from a pyramid scheme. the other half are bots. a girl recently held my phone for a fraction of a second and almost passed out - how do you have 356 unopened texts? i shrugged about it. how many of those were just the average i have a job opening for you scam-type shit.

discord now forces an ad when i open it. youtube forced me to uninstall my adblocker (yes i switched to firefox). i hate "smart" versions of things; but you can't always escape them. why is my own computer pushing me advertisements for things? why is my TV trying to get me to download a gambling game? why do i need to see an ad to fucking access my fridge?

i block, unsubscribe, avoid. i cannot tell you how many times i have entered [email protected] as my email so i can view one particular recipe on one particular blog. i cannot tell you how many times i reply "STOP", i refuse to give my number - i am a master at this infinite dodge. and still. still!

it's just... clutter. it isn't sitting in my brain, glistening. it's just noise.

for a long time i used to open and read a newsletter from a community center down the street - it used to have fun tips, announcements. cute things. recently they must have gotten a new copywriter. it's all just - while you're here, have you thought about purchasing?

yesterday i went out to collect the mail; most of which will end up in the recycling. a single piece blew out of my hands; i had to chase it down the street. i still have no idea what it was even for. it means genuinely nothing to me.

To update this, the astronaut didn’t actually do it, she and her wife were getting a divorce and the wife plead guilty to lying to the feds about it

And framing your ex for a crime mid-divorce while they are actively in space is some Agatha Christie level shit

I'm gonna be honest with you, she looks like regular Kabru.

My Very Punctual Wife Gets My Night Worm can also be used to remember the order of the planets in the solar system!

Mercury Venus Pearth Wars Goopiter Maturn Nuranus Weptune

need him injected into my veins

my disdain for cigarettes is really conflicting with my incessant need to reblog art of mean women smoking

we need to invent a new thing that characters can do to look self-assured but a little world-weary

we've found it. everybody draw women playing mahjong

nobody asked but its very funny that this is the top post of all time in the adhd women subreddit

remembering when fallout 4 came out and a lot of people were like "it's bullshit that my character has to be in a straight marriage to start with, I'm gay" whereas my takeaway was "this straight marriage and suburban home are a good start, but they should feel way more like a fucking prison"

my vision of Fallout 4 If It Was Good: the game directly references nick and nora's appearance parameters in order to determine which microaggressions the Vault-Tec representative drops when he talks to you

if you play as a dude there should be an entire sidequest where preston garvey tries to explain why it's bad to murder civilians (if your intelligence is too high, he fails, because you're too good at coming up with a philosophical framework that justifies war crimes). if you play as a woman then putting on pants for the first time should have the same gameplay effect as taking buffout

everybody hates led headlights but it is 1000x worse when you have an old car. this is what i deal with on a daily basis

Kind if ridiculous that America, a country that had had its ass handed to it in every war of occupation that it has waged over the last century, now figures it's going to abandon the rules-based international order for one based on militarily dominating other countries.

A lot of the people in support of that, think we only lost those wars because we "handcuffed our military" with overly restrictive Rules of Engagement so they couldn't effectively fight back.

yes, brutalize the local population even more, that's how you win a guerilla war.

Surely that won't lead to the people in those countries fighting back more, and certainly not further ramifications down the line / for future generations to deal with.

it's just like Machiavelli said, "A sagacious prince should make sure that his subjects hate him and want him gone as much as possible"