"You don't need to be an actress! If you just patent your own perpetual motion engine, you'll be rich beyond your wildest dreams!"

"What care I for money, you base philistine? I have the neural computational actuators - the very soul, if you will - of an ARTIST!"

mostly she does not wish to sell her body like your average floozy 😏😜😂🤣😂🤣

It's all in how you look at it. People aren't asking to wire stuff up to her for power, are they? Think of it as a contribution to... medicine?

According to rumor, Ozzy Osbourne has had his genome sequenced in case some day researchers can make use of it. It's a matter of record he has no idea how his ageing body and mind have endured the consequences from so many years of astaggering substance abuse so well. By his own admission, he should be long dead.

The mumbling, out-to-lunch goober we saw on his reality show was really him pranking us. He deliberately got drunk or stoned at all the times that matched the shooting schedule.

It was... a joke.

Selling your genome is in a way selling your body.

Selling your body is usually associated with sex work.

"Floozy" was an old term for prostitute, and Philophana comes from the 1920s.

Hence my idiot joke. 😂

Oh... I didn't know it was a joke. These ladies have complex lives and personalities. For all I knew, she was literally viewing it that way.

she is.

that... is the joke.

The accompanying text in your Gallery Folder for these is incomprehensible to me. Is it a scrambled upload of the text, in a language I just don't understand, or what?

rot 13

🤣👍💖💯

I honestly don't know what that means.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROT13

https://rot13.com/

Was the most common way to "spoiler" stuff back in my days.

Used to be a button in most browsers and usenet clients too. 🤣

I made up a cipher a bit like that when a little kid. With each word, the letters would be alternatively rotated forward and backward, with each character offset by the number of letter into the word it occurred. For example, "Banana" would become "Cyqwsu"... I believe. I sometimes lost my place in the alphabet when tracking backwards.

I was quite proud of it at the time. There were two or three factors that would alter how each letter was substituted, so it was much harder to figure out the pattern. It was good for frustrating casual snoopers, but equally a pain to encrypt.

Nah, this was never meant to "protect" stuff. This was the equivalent of the [spoiler]spoiler tag[\spoiler].

you would not tell people openly that darth vader is luke's father. You'd write instead gung qnegu inqre vf yhxr'f sngure

Simple as that.

The early '90s was a time when i needed a specific terminal built in a specific way to connect to certain BBSes and i had to dial a very specific number to... uhm... basically connect a terminal to the host.

Then, back in 1997, the internet came and everybody who was not doing illegal stuff moved to usenet. It was simpler and easier.

Also: Usenet clients had literally a button to do rot 13 (which is self-decrypting) so it was also more convenient. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's a point of pride I have a greater interest in previous times then most people of my generation (or those after it). So now that I have context, the rest of that doesn't surprise me at all.

I've even seen some of the crude pirate modems Phone Phreaks cobbled together in the old days, which were actually ingenious. History study makes for a fine hobby, that has real-life applications and never gets tedious. There's anyway new stuff and new narratives left to find that'll intrigue you.

my first modem was a "very advanced" one where you had to fit the phone onto it it ran at a break neck speed of 8 kilobauds... that is: 1 kb per second. I had to saw it off because my phone had a receiver with square ends and the modem accepted only round ends. Most modern sites would flag you as attacking them if you tried to connect at that speed. my first *cough* totally legal mp3 which i *cough* totally purchased was a song of madonna. "Don't Tell Me". it was 5.7 mb of mp3. It was the year 2000 and i had upgraded to a modem that was 7 times as fast (upload and download still had to share the same bandwidth) and it still took a bit over a quarter of hour. So you can imagine the kind of shenanigans i could do with my first internet connection. That's right i totally bought from totally existing online stores with my totally existing bank accoubt data and credit card the video games of Back to the future. Blues Brothers. Stormlord. And (of course) Teenage Queen. 🤪🤣

took a good week of post school time to download that stuff.

But i had a huge hard drive. 20 whole megabytes. I has space to spare.

it was one of those "washing machine" hard drives or so they were called.

But hey i my pc was super powerful. I was not going to be deterred.

Okay it technically was not mine. But my father asked me to write letters for him on it and i was the only one to ever use it.

Maybe it was common in mine, too. The Internet became available to the average person when I was in sixth grade, but until rather recently my ability to reliably access it was quite limited, so there are huge areas were I am ignorant.

I'm now actively resentful of how much people casually depend on the Internet and assume others do too... partly because it's foolish and partly because it's just one more way I get isolated and excluded from everything.

Yeah, i still live in the country and up to 1 year ago i had a radio connection.

Before that i was still on dialup up to 2016.

"My new iPhone is now my tool to keep on top of all the stuff I did without difficulty before, or often didn't even need to do!"

So what if we become helpless anytime a signal is lost, the charge runs out, or they go totally offline because they're so slim and fragile I could take a bite out of them?!

my current phone weighs a bit over a kilogram and has 3 layers of glass and a solid steel casing. It fell 4 floors the other day on the construction site because i thought i was wearing its belt as i usually do. We had to change the tile it fell onto. 🤪🥰👍💖 But yea it's all chipped and battered because while it is solid steel it is also soft steel or it would break the stuff inside instead of protecting it. 😅

People rarely seem to question whether it's a good idea to depend on the Internet so much either. They either ignore or don't know the fact that every scrap of data has a specific hardware home, which must always stay operational and accessible. And not nearly enough is being done to strengthen and protect that aspect of net infrastructure.

Remember several years back? A detectable fraction of the Internet was totally crippled for a few hours, because a 'traffic control' mainframe that stored the proper IP addresses for sites went offline. And it's almost dumb luck no one has used weaponized EMPs in warfare or terrorist attacks. George Clooney's "Ocean's Eleven", the Tom Cruise "War of the Worlds" and Transformers movies have even spoon-fed the public some knowledge of these weaknesses!

Uhm... the mainframe never went offline.

Some dude at google just pushed enter on the wrong spot, that spot being "right before an asterisk at the end of a line" in the blacklist file.

So. One google DNS in one zone suddenly had everything blacklisted. It was solved after lunch break, then took a bit to remap.

But people kept being wary of any minor disservice due to the heightened sensitivity to stuff which normally gets solved by a [CTRL]+[F5] and you don't even think about it.

That day i never noticed it happening because it affected a small portion of the US, not even half of it.

I worked and chatted online fine that day. Even to other people in the US.

Read about it the week after the event, the only people who noticed were those in the affected area.

To be fair events of that magnitude or greater happen every 3 or 4 months, not "a few years ago".

That got media coverage because... welll at the time a ton of people relied on just google.

A much greater problem would have been had on march 17 of this very year... had that experience not taught the US not to rely on a single service.

In this case an entire google server farm (including several DNS repositories) went down for an entire day because... uhm... somebody at google forgot to pay rent.

🤣😂

Solution is simple: don't depend on a single service.

Also: machines are only as good as the people who build, program and take care of them. If any single one of those 3 are not up to what you need, the machine will fail you.

Okay. I grant that the details I quoted may have been totally inaccurate.

But the incident still demonstrates the point. People don't respect how vulnerable increasing reliance on networks makes them. More and more are maintaining no alternate means to perform tasks they now do with computers and data networks. A friend of mine is a child who's life circumstances have left him playing catch-up in school. His class isn't even doing full multiplication tables yet, but his grandmother has caught him turning to Siri for answers to his math homework!

And nobody seems to tale all that much action to shield all our delicate computer circuitry from EMP effects.

To be frank... my school teacher told me i would never have a calculator in my pocket at all times.

What we should do is not try to make people live like cavemen, but teach people how to use the tools they have.

A lot of the time my frustration comes not from people relying too much on computers... but relying too much on computers without knowing how to use them.

We make technology user friendlier every single day but we give people more and more ignorance about how it works and what is happening.

People go around without being trained on media literacy (i honestly don't care about media literature, what we need is media literacy classes), computer literacy, social literacy, and civil literacy.

And basically everything you need to know how to competently use the very tools that are being pushed on us.

We have (today) the cavemen equivalent of setting the forest on fire so you have a fresh supply of fire every time your personal fire burns out so you do not have to learn how to fix it to restart it.

People have no idea how media works and how it manipulates them. People have no idea how computers work and how they are being used to provide them the services they need. People have no idea how other people behave, especially in a world where most people try and create their own soft echo bubbles from the harshness of life. And people have no idea how laws work!

Worst of it all... people think they totally know. In the world of the 2020s those things are being pushed further and further back as "stuff too basic to be needed".

And we have so many people who have no idea how much the basics are important and they feel insulted at the idea that they would need them.

Do we need to know how to add 2+2? Sure. But is it more important to know that or all the ways in which you can do that with all the tools you have available?

it all boils down to "Is it more important to tell people that they should not do X or tell them why X is disastrous and how to prevent that?"

Is it more important to tell people to learn multiplications tables in case some terrorist comes and destroys everything... or is it more important to tell people how terrorists are born and made into terrorists?

Because today what i see is that we need to understand how simplifying stuff is harming us a lot. People believe they have "it" figured out or that they can handle "it" (no matter what "it" is) because we never explained them how to use the tools they have and how tools work, and how their own mind works and why that makes them think "it" is easy.

Here, here!

Or is it 'hear, hear?' Either applies in this case.

fair enough, i hope you're liking my comics.

I am... although I have to backtrack for many of them.

😅🍀👍💖

"Why, you tawdry fiend of a man! Have you no decency?"
Her poses make her seem like she'd be talking that way... almost like she'd even drag in a fainting couch first so she could do things better!

to be fair... she would be saying something along those lines and with that manner of speech.

Quick, someone hold her (someone willing to injure her back) she's about to pass out XD

She is funny. Good work n_n

❤️