When I was in high school, I was the part-time henchperson of a Mad Scientist.
I’m not exaggerating about “Mad Scientist”. “Riley” (Name changed for his family’s privacy) was a former Medical Doctor, as well as an artist, microbiologist, pilot (as in, designed and flew his own experimental aircraft), magician, computer programmer and musical composer, and had an outbuilding attached to his house where he kept things like his hand-made 3D printer, electron microscope and drone-dirigible assembly devices.
Riley had ALS and was eventually wheelchair-bound, so by 2006 I was being called in on the odd school night or weekend to go out around FoCo and the surrounding mountains. “I need a younger set of legs and someone with no fear of heights” He’d say. Being that I was a very boring child that had no interest in sex or drugs and always called when I was going to be late, and that Riley was a trusted family friend, My parents trusted me to go out at like 9PM and come home at 2AM on a Tuesday.
…To do things like scale locked fire escapes and climb around on rooftops that we DEFINITELY did not have permission to be on to do things like install speakers and bluetooth broadcasting devices at strategic points around Old Town so that if you download the right app onto your phone (I’ve got it backed up somewhere, I’ll post it when I find it) , you can walk around town and be exposed to the ghostly, extremely shady side of FoCo history for his 2007 Halloween project.
We did get caught by the cops but I was 17, short and white as goddamn mayonnaise so when the cops asked me what I was doing “It’s for a community art project!” actually worked.
My favorite Mad Science Project was in 2009, Gallus rostromegalus.
I was home from college for summer, and Riley had been messing around with Rotational Physics and had managed to make Giant (24’ x 18’) extremely realistic Chicken eggs, weighted and everything so that if you picked one up, it would feel like there was a heavy yolk wobbling around inside. They’re amusing all on their own, but after leaving them in the slash pile from spring cleaning, Riley realized they had POTENTIAL.
So we went around getting permission from a few businesses and the art museum, and I spent a few nights making plausible enormous chicken feathers in Riley’s lab out of grass, acrylic glaze and some other odds and ends laying around, and filling up the back of my mom’s van with as much of the backyard slash pile as fit in there, then drove out in the middle of the night to set up giant nests for the eggs, strewn with feathers and surrounded by Traffic cones and orange construction mesh and signs from the entirely fictitious “Department Of Fish And Wildfowl, Specious Relocation Division”
(an incomplete nest on the steps of Fort Collins Museum of Art)
(signage, responsibly warning people to stay away in case of giant chickens)
Riley even made QR codes that linked back to an obviously false Wiki- if you scrolled to the bottom, the page was covered in feathers and after five minutes it would start to make chicken noises.
People. Went. INSANE.
Crowds turned up to take selfies with the nests and Riley tracked down literally dozens of tagged photos captioned “IS THIS REAL????”.
Someone wrote a very worried and not terribly facetious-sounding letter to the editor concerned that Giant Chickens were roaming around FoCo, something that big could hurt someone! There was an entirely-serious-sounding counter-letter that we Humans have clearly invaded this majestic creature’s natural habitat, where are they SUPPOSED to make their nests, huh?
Multiple people called the police to report having seen the elusive Gallus rostromegalus up in the hills or skulking around downtown. Reports claimed it was anywhere form five to twelve feet tall, with dramatic plumage and an eerie, yodeling sort of call.
A few nights after installing each nest, we went back, collected the eggs, and left broken ‘eggshells’ and extra down feather around each of the nests. One of the nests was put up at the local Garden Center and I remember one of the assistant managers coming outside just after we finished the ‘hatching’ and shrieking “OH GOD I THOUGHT THOSE WERE FAKE THEY’LL GET TO THE TOMATOES SOMEONE CALL THE POLICE!” That woman would later become my manager when I worked there for a summer, though she never made the connection between me and The Chickens.
Riley passed away in 2015 after a good and well-lived life, and was kind enough to leave me The Eggs in his will.
It was a truly splendid bit of ruckus, and I miss him terribly, and I very much treasure the memories. And the Eggs, which I am absolutely going to inflict on some unsuspecting neighbors at some point, in his honor.
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“what’s a pen license???? stupid australians lolololol”
well americans if you knew anything about other countries you’d know that in 1997 after the government outright banned anyone having guns ever in australia they widened the ban to cover other weapons
so like knives and rolling pins and shovels and things so you need a cookery license (you have to be 18 to buy a knife regardless) to buy one and for like hardware and tools – i mean, a hammer is a weapon and a half – you have to pay ten percent of your salary to a bunnings warehouse and then they’ll let you have a hammer. only if you have your tradesman’s license of course. and of course, your large animals license, if you want anything like a horse or a dog or a working emu.
so pens are pretty necessary to like everyday life, so the government hasn’t outlawed them (yet) but people need to take their pen license in primary school to demonstrate they won’t harm anyone with a pen and shall use it responsibly – that is, writing and self defence from cassowaries and drop bears and so on.
Subversive children in Australian primary schools who refuse or cannot
pass their pen license have been known to switch over to mechanical
pencils.
Little known fact, mechanical pencils are not considered weaponry largely based on the fact their mechanism differs from pens and despite their utility as a stabbing tool and their secondary projectile capabilities.
It’s a loop hole that the gun lobby has, oddly, been trying to close as they feel the ridiculous nature of requiring licenses to use pencils will force the Australian public to rescind the gun laws.
Personally I’m just waiting for somebody to notice the artists and their metal rulers.
Isn’t that a state/federal thing though? Because I know in Victoria they’ve barred rulers made from anything but flexible plastic or round-edged paper.
Oh shit. I use a metal ruler all the time. Is it too late to hand it in without being charged with an offence? I don’t need a buyback just amnesty. Fuck, my criminal record is pristine. Oh nooo.
I’m going to assume that some if not all of these laws are things you made up for a funny joke, because every Australian I’ve ever met is a gleeful vector of chaos.
pretty typical response for an ignorant yank how about you don’t make fun of other country’s sensible laws?
Fic where all of the Avengers are trying to teach tech stuff to Steve (especially Tony who just gets so annoyed at his apparent tech incompetence) but he just seems super hopeless at it until one day one of them stumbles across a youtube account that’s filled with a series of videos titled ‘How Long Can I Keep My Friends Convinced I Have No Idea What Technology Is’ and it turns out he’s been gaming them for YT hits for months.
“How do I make the Google do the thing” has over 30 million hits alone.
It works even better if you put it in a universe where they all have secret identities, so rather than Captain America conning, say, Hawkeye, it’s just some super built dude who for some reason (probably that he’s blond) is vastly underestimated by his equally anonymous friends. A debate rages constantly in the comments about whether that guy IS Tony Stark or just a ringer.
a. Steve’s username is brooklyn1917 and the top question he keeps getting is “Are you really Captain America?” The other question is “Please tell us if you’re actually Chris Evans.”
b. Steve eventually makes a video to address these two questions. Except he basically spends the video laughing for like five minutes and then just smiles this ACTUAL LITTLE SHIT GRIN and then goes, “No, I’m not Chris Evans.” It drives his fans into a frothing frenzy.
c. After the “How Do I Make Google Do The Thing” debacle, the next most popular videos are “How Do I Get My Email Through YouTube?” and “Why is My Email Not in My Mailbox Outside My Door?” There are varying reactions among the Avengers for this. Natasha’s “I’m Going to Kill You Very Slowly™” Face is terrifying. Clint’s “There Is Not Enough Coffee In the World” Lament is priceless. And Tony…. well. Tony’s Rant is Lord of the Rings Epic with Fan Fiction thrown in.
d. Thor is the first person to figure out that Steve is a Little Shit™ and totally joins him on the Trolling.
e. Bruce was the one who actually discovered the YouTube channel. He was promptly bribed into silence by copious amounts of Sarah Rogers’ Patented Chocolate Fudge Magic Brownies™.
f. Bruce’s favorite video is the Instagram Saga, in which Steve Rogers Has Everyone Else Convinced That He Thinks This Is Really a Telegram Service.
g. Currently, Sam Wilson is about to be bribed into keeping silence and to aid and abet any and all shenanigans.
h. Peter Parker is one of Steve’s number one fans and is responsible for feeding Steve more ideas in his YouTube comments.
i. The one Steve had the most fun with was “Where Do I Light the Fire in the Microwave?” He destroyed three of them before the team forbade him to go near the kitchen. (There was also an incident with a toaster, and one of the three microwaves did a round in the dishwasher “to put the tiny waves back in it, now that I let them leak out.”)
I think by now most rational people have a pretty good idea of how insane music fandom is, but as a member of a semi-infamous update blog I saw some pretty fucked up, maybe illegal things on a daily basis. I was a member of one that started early on and exploded shortly before 1D itself did.
This is, if u will, the oral history of our downfall.
The girls who started the blog (there were three) were well known in the twitter fandom with thousands of followers each, and each was from a different continent. I knew one of them through her less popular tumblr so she invited me on because I had made photoshop commissions for her before. And I could make gifs. I wasn’t a ‘founding’ member, but I was ‘original’.
Everything was chill for awhile. We had a tumblr and a twitter, and some girls tried to branch out to Facebook and Instagram, but our real success was the twitter (of course it was). Within a few months, we had thousands of followers, and broke a few stories to the twitter fandom (I’m not saying which, but…..think shit that happened around the time This Is Us was happening. That was our Peak.) At the end of 2013 we had around 20.000 followers spread over our five sites, I think it was. Maybe 25.000. There are people who would kill me for being wrong lol
Founding member A, not the one I was close with, decided to bring on more people to manage everything, especially because we were like beginning/midway through WWA and there were too many videos and pictures coming in each night for us to manage all of it. By the time the tour ended we had 25 members assigned to a different team each, five for each boy (I was on Harry/a floater for Niall, which you’ll hear more about in a second). We had one big group chat and one chat for each team.
This is when shit starts to get fucked up and illegal. As an ‘original’ member, I and two other girls were given preference by the ‘founders’, we were given credits to our personal accounts and assignments and the group banded together to win one of those other girls tickets to one of the shows of OTRA I think but maybe it was WWA? I don’t fucking remember. She got VIP passes.
So of course that made the 19 people who weren’t ‘originals’ fucking mad. We straight up had a class system, the later you came in the more you were treated like dirt doing menial tasks like sourcing and searching. And you never got thanked. I was a team leader for the Harry team so I started to notice how fucked up this was and I mentioned that we should help the other 19 people with things they needed help with, contests and attributions and everything to the founder that I knew before the update account. She agreed and said she would bring it to the other two founders.
I wake up the next day and everything was wiped. I was kicked out of the Harry team, passwords were reset, and they left me in the big group chat so I could see them tearing me and my friend apart. They ousted her too. By the point I had accumulated a lot of insider sources from DMs and knew image accounts so my friend and I said fuck it and started a new account, taking some of the disgruntled people from the first update account with us. We refused to post when they were liked or retweeted, and we memorised their personal accounts so we never retweeted or reblogged from there either.
Now the illegal stuff begins. It turns out, Founder A’s ‘friend at a label’ who was getting us information before anyone else was the result of some guy hacking a server at a major gossip site. She was fucking him to keep him going. Really fucking wild shit. He was arrested for unrelated leaks and all of a sudden everything just crumbled and she came to our second site all in tears and said we had been given a lawsuit and numerous cease and desists relating to our time there. Paps had found that we were attributing their pics as ours, even though we though we could put watermarks on our edits, and an agency was going to sue.
The hacking had been connected to that update account and it seriously looked like people were going to get arrested over having updates before anyone else, like, not even kidding. So it comes out Founder B (not the one I knew lol let’s just call my friend C) was selling the site out, she was profiting from it without telling anyone by doing subtle sponsorships (like posting 1D promoing those products or something) and the paps could say we had profited from their work because of it.
Like, 25 people were in this mess. There were 12 of us on the second site. Someone straight up got on FaceTime and had to be talked down from suicide because of the way she had been treated as a member of Team Louis (which had a secret fucking 29 year old Larrie even tho we had a policy we only used ships for RTs and none of us actually shipped that shit)
Zayn left the fucking band???
There was no resolution. Like one day everything was deleted. It’s all gone. The group chats, the sites, everything. Our edits float around because they were stolen by basically everyone, but we didn’t hear anything else about the lawsuit so me and the second site team figured that the other people had resolved that shit and none of us had been approached again so we kept going.
Yesterday Founder B popped up in our DMs and admitted that she was pretending to be three other people who had been members of the team (low tier, bullied members) and she had told Founder A about the lawsuits and her selling the site out and that it was all made up, she didn’t know about A’s source being that fucking guy at the time but once A told her that she had found ‘a hacker’ for us (probably some loser that in reality got her nothing, she found these things on other sites and from DMs on her personal) she ran with it and spun this wild story with her in order to destroy the site. The levels to the lies. I’m.
Because she had started a new one. On her own. With old tactics.
Also I still have tracking for certain planes and cars from my days on the team and Jesus Christ we were basically the NSA.
math was a goddamn mistake id like to sit down and have a serious talk with every mathematician ever they knew perfectly well the nature of their crimes
After three (3) years since the release of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) dir. Anthony and Joe Russo, I still don’t understand why the Captain America exhibit was held in the Air and Space Museum. Steve Rogers is not even a pilot. The only time he ever manned a plane, and he nosedived it straight into the Arctic.
it was a special exhibition called “Famous Idiots Who Can’t Fucking Fly”
I want a story about a king whose son is prophesied to kill him so the king is like “whatever what am I supposed to do, kill my own kid wtf is wrong with you” so he just raises him as normal, doesn’t even tell him about the prophecy, and instead of some convoluted twist of events that leads to the king’s murder the son grows up and when the king is very old and dying and in excruciating pain the kid is just like alright I’mma put him out of his misery.
The king’s son becomes the new king, and is prophesied to defeat evil and bring an age of prosperity. His generals and knights all crack their knuckles but he pretty much ignores them and focuses on strengthening the infrastructure of his kingdom. Forty years later he is old and sick but still hearing his subjects’ grievances, and a general’s like “how will you defeat the prophesied evil now? You’re old and weak.” Another visitor, a teenager fresh out of the kingdom’s public education system, looks at the general like he is an ignoramus. The king eradicated poverty, housed the homeless, taught the ignorant, ended class exploitation by abolishing the nobility and imprisoning the corrupt, and established a highly respected guild of doctors that recently figured out how to cure the plague. There are no brigands because there is enough wealth for everyone to live comfortably; hiding in the woods and taking trinkets from people simply doesn’t make any sense for anyone but the desperate, and the people are not desperate. Evil is a weed, explains the teenager. It grows in cracked roads and crumbling houses and forgotten corners, rooted in indifference and watered by suffering. But the king demands that broken things be mended and suffering people be made well.
No evil lives in this kingdom, says the teenager. It starved to death before I was born.
My favorite thing about Victor Hugo is that the Notre Dame Cathedral was a huge eyesore on the verge of collapsing and was planned to be demolished but Victor Hugo was like “hey 😦 I like that building” and wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame to save it. and it worked
In the book he described the cathedral in the state it was in but also in comparison to what it looked like in the 15th century before it got all fucked up in the French Revolution. His book got translated into a fuck ton of languages and was distributed all around Europe. Tourists who were fans of him would go to see it while in Paris and were appalled to see just how bad of shape it was in and it started to become stain on paris’ reputation.
So finally the king funded the Hella expensive restoration which I imagine was one really fucking gnarly project, the structure it’s self being the tip of the ice burg because of how many religious artifacts and statutes and junk that had been ruined.
So thanks Vicky that’s one hell of a beautiful tower.
So you’re telling me that we still have the Notre Dame Cathedral because of fanfiction?
how about you don’t make fun of other country’s sensible laws?
backup from Tumblr 