theres a new product by verzion called “hum” that allows your parents to track your car and places you go, if your parents are controlling like mine please check under your steering wheel to make sure that they havent installed this
here is what it looks like installed:
you can read more about it here, and here– this excerpt sums up what information Hum will send:
“a car’s owner will be able to get notified on their phone when the vehicle leaves a pre-determined area or drives faster than a set speed… [Hum] will enable location tracking and a driving log, which measures travel times, engine idle times, and average speeds.”
People in abusive relationships, please check your cars.
DO NOT TRY TO UNPLUG IT BY YOURSELF!
To add to this nightmare, I’ve just heard of a thing called ForceField where people get to monitor and block internet sites that you’re going on if they don’t approve.
It tells the user what sites/apps you’re going on, for how long you’re on them, and WHERE YOU ARE ON AN UPDATING MAP.
So you know if you’re in an abusive household and use sites like tumblr to escape and talk to friends, you could be cut off from that.
They say “it’s not spyware” but it sure sounds controlling and creepy to me.
signalboost
God. Fuck. That’s scary.
Life 360 is another tracker. My parents have used it on me, not allowing me to delete it from my phone, and sometimes even demanding selfies to prove I was where the map said. (As if I’d go anywhere without my phone)
SpectorPro is another one. Afaik it can’t track location, but it takes screenshots roughly every 20sec to allow the installer to watch a video of your computer activity. It also tracks all keystrokes, so passwords aren’t safe, and records any website you visit + the duration. It’s incredibly creepy and a huge violation of privacy, and was one of the cornerstones of my abuse as a kid.
even if you’re not in an abusive relationship/family, please spread this because you might have just saved someone’s life
– weighted a grapefruit in my hands to see if i could justifiably describe something as “weighing as much as a grapefruit”
– done jumping jacks for 5 minutes straight so the memory of how exertion feels would be fresh in my mind
– googled images of butterscotch to see if “butterscotch” could be a hair colour
– casually stared at people at bus stops trying to figure out how i would hypothetically recreate their image in words
– written 7 different beginnings for a story to see which one i liked best
– gone to venice
– enthusiastically spoken dialogue aloud to myself to see how it sounds
– tried to read 3 books in one day
– experienced terrible things, reacting with “i can write about this”
– screamed incoherently at someone for turning on the tv while i was in the room, writing
– sat there perfectly still staring into space trying to imagine what getting a boner feels like
– “hey re-enact this scene with me”
– sat upside-down for ten minutes trying to get my brain to work
– squandered schoolwork and free time alike for years
– written
I’m alarmed by how familiar some of these feel to me.
I’m on register at work:
~waits patiently behind counter with absent smile until a customer walks close enough and/or shows necessary amount of interest
~has a set script of prompts in my head to follow during transactions
~cheerful yet non-descript customer service voice and can repeat same exact tone infinitely.
~breaking from prompts or skipping through parts may cause minor glitches, such as accidentally repeating the same prompt again or completely skipping necessary ones
~absentmindedly tends to my area using the same five or so actions in a continuous loop until new person arrives
~Abnormally knowledgeable in my craft
~wears same outfit every day
~Nothing unusual phases me
~walking away and coming back is like a brand new interaction. I have little to no memory of you
Morally grey: A character who does too much bad to be a good person, but does too much good to be a bad person.
Sympathetic villain: A character who is a bad person, but whose backstory/character arc makes you feel sorry for or sympathetic towards them.
Anti-hero: A character who does bad things to achieve a good goal.
Anti-villain: A character who does bad things to achieve a goal that they believe to be good, but is actually messed up.
Just plain annoying: A character who does bad things to achieve a bad goal but has one throwaway line about a hard childhood that is expected to put them into one of the aforementioned categories when in reality it just makes them annoying
Meet The Universe’s First-Ever Supermassive Binary Black Holes
“In 1891, the object OJ 287, 3.5 billion light years distant and a blazar itself, optically bursted. Every 11-12 years since, it’s produced another burst, recently discovered to have two, narrowly-separated peaks. Its central, supermassive black hole is 18 billion solar masses, one of the largest known in the Universe. This periodic double-burst arises from a 100-150 million solar mass black hole punching through the primary’s accretion disk.”
The big problem with black holes is that, well, they’re so dark. They don’t emit any detectable light of their own, so we have to rely on indirect, secondary signals to infer their existence. That usually arises in the form of radio and X-ray radiation from matter that gets accelerated by the black hole’s extreme gravity, as well as from the magnetic fields that an accretion disk around the black hole can create. The radiation can form jets, and when a jet points at our eyes, we see a blazar. Well, the system OJ 287 has a periodic blazar that flares in a double-burst every 11-12 years, indicative of a large, supermassive black hole orbiting an even more massive behemoth, punching through the accretion disk twice with every orbit.
