Wandering Adventure Party

*sigh* several weeks ago, I tried to view something on Harvard University's rare manuscript site ("Curiosity Collections"), but the images were all broken. Digging into the javascript console, I found that the images are not missing from the server if you extract their URLs, but the json is being put together wrong and the viewer can't parse it. I sent an email to the site's contact person with all the info I had. They were apologetic and said their maintainers were "aware" of the issue, but the vague reason they gave me (a VPN issue) doesn't make a lot of sense in the context that the images are all loadable if you know their URL and the viewer is crashing in a json parsing function. So I suspect someone told the contact person a plausible-sounding reason without investigating. At the very least, they don't seem to be trying at all to fix it.So the rare manuscripts website of a world-major university has been languishing broken for several weeks at minimum, but who knows how long it'd been like that before I, personally, noticed. I guess this is a "state of American education" post.

psychology literature on autism is all so cringe. "90% of autistic people are men" 100% of us can't believe you've fallen for this self-fulfilling diagnostic issue. ... and 90% of us wear striped knee socks."a few autistic people are so high-functioning that they even manage to hold down a job" we are holding down the entire science and tech economy, Clarence. "a defining characteristic of autism is a lack of desire to share interests with others and a deficiency in theory of mind" I think the issue might be that you have never once spoken to a single autistic person as if YOU possess theory of mind, Karen. Now, the doors have been locked for your convenience, and my six hour presentation on obscure writing systems may commence.

no-one's quite sure what this Western Zhou art piece *is,* but so many people said "are you sure it's not a wifi router?" that the Anhui Museum installed a working wifi access point named "Western Zhou Router" in its display case. source https://www.chinanews.com.cn/cul/2025/12-01/10524970.shtml h/t @dramforever

@0xabad1dea Does Silicon Valley understand consent?

Fresh graffiti on Odin’s usual route — so presumably they meant him. #dog #dogs #dogsofmastodon

To translate formal Dutch to informal English: “bro, are you saying that if an undocumented immigrant calls us, the cops, and says ‘help help I’m being murdered’, we’re not allowed to go save them? do we need to ask to see someone’s passport before we pull them out of a burning fire? we, the cops, find this new law profoundly fucked up” https://www.politie.nl/nieuws/2025/juli/4/00-reactie-politie-op-instemming-tweede-kamer-met-anmw.html

@Rusty @zorinlynx @0xabad1dea Maybe its not a header but something like a client ID or something. Something used for optional authentication that the server just reads its lack or sending a 0 as highly suspicious.Just switching to a different open source mobile mail app solved it on my end, but its definitely an example I can think of where I had an "okay, emails sent from my computer go through, emails sent from my phone are not reaching destination" because it piqued problem solving brain