It's True: They Send You Things In The Mail, Or They Arrest You On A Warrant. Not A Lot Of Middle Ground.

It's true: they send you things in the mail, or they arrest you on a warrant. Not a lot of middle ground. I've seen a rise in user-friendly online portals for jury service, the census, etc, but the link and password or code all get sent out by mail, too. Unless you opted into a phone notification system via a multi-step process designed in the 90s, the call is a scam.

Fun story: I got a call from "the FBI" about my overdue student loans while I was interning at a US Attorney's Office. In the same building as the FBI. I asked him for his name and badge number and told him I'd be right downstairs to chat in his office.

He hung up.

Hey so fun new scam just dropped! I got a call earlier today from someone spoofing the local police department's desk number, asking me if there was a reason I'd missed my jury summons this morning.

Friends, I had not received a jury summons for this month. Which I told him, at which point his previously clear diction suddenly turned into a rapid mumble, only becoming clear for scary words like 'federal' and then asking to confirm my address, at which point I hung up and decided to call the police department later.

When I called the police department the desk officer sounded so tired y'all. All I had to say was "Hey I got a call earlier saying I missed jury duty this morning?" and she immediately sighed and told me that yes it was a scam that was going around and thanked me for calling to confirm.

So this is your periodic reminder that law enforcement agencies will not call you to tell you that you're in trouble. If you need to pay a fine of some sort they will mail you a physical invoice. Anyone calling you saying they're from the police or any other law enforcement organization (up to the CIA and yes I have heard of scammers attempting to impersonate CIA agents over the phone) who then tries to get financial information from you over the phone is a scammer.

I know I actually bang on about this a weird amount, but it is my fervent hope that the information will stick in peoples' brains if they get randomly selected for the adrenaline spike lottery. Scammers use scary words to get you to panic in order to shut down your critical thinking, and if even one person's brain spits out "Tumblr user waterhobbit said the cops/CIA/federal marshalls don't call about this shit" before their bank account routing number is in the hands of assholes I will consider it a job well done.

Amazing idea for a procedural. 10/10.

story about a heist team doing a heist of colonial museums and returning unethically stolen sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony to their original communities

but the story isn’t about them

the story is a legal thriller about the repatriation coordinator and the pro bono lawyer who get frantically called in by that community when an artifact goes missing from a museum and shows up unexpectedly at their doorstep and now they are in a shit ton of (potentially international) legal trouble because the heist team did not take the legal ramifications into account, and no one else believes them that they didn’t steal it, and The Law is saying they are legally obligated to return it to the museum and are also probably going to go to prison for this, and activists are protesting, and it’s rocking the repatriation world, and it’s turning into a huge Thing

WIP Wednesday: Custos Custodium

Have some Jensen-Pritchard snark! I ripped ShadowChild's entrance out of the events of Breach because a) she's cool, and I wanted her to pop up more than once; b) I needed to set up an augmentation trick anyway; c) I was already repurposing Breach; and d) see above Jensen¬Pritchard vibes. (That's the formal-logic NOT operator, FYI--seems more apropos than an ampersand.) Read the whole thing at https://archiveofourown.org/works/55686901/chapters/141357007

“Francis. What’ve I done to deserve this?”

“Good evening, Jensen. How’s Prague? I hope I’m not interrupting your busy schedule of brooding and kicking down doors.”

He took a slug of the new beer before responding. “How’d you know where I am?”

“I know you like to think you’re off the grid these days, but you do realize there’s a record when you use your credit chip or have a package sent to your apartment—nice slippers, I must say—and Interpol’s HR database is not their best-kept secret. Plus, I calibrated your systems. Every time you call or text, your infolink is broadcasting your position as well as your words. To me, at least.”

Jensen felt a muscle jump in his jaw. “So, you call just to chat, or…?”

“Six months ago, when the rest of the world thought you were dead and I helped you get back on your feet, I seemed to recall you saying, and I quote here, ‘I really owe you one, Pritchard.’” He forced his voice low and raspy.

Jensen rolled his eyes at the caricature. “I don’t recall saying it quite like that.” But he couldn’t deny that Pritchard had come through for him in a tight spot—and not just logistically. His chat with Sarif could have gone much worse without Pritchard’s righteous anger backing him up, and he might not have ever gotten mixed up with the Task Force or the Collective without that clearing of the air. Plus, almost anything would be better than stewing in his own aimless misery for a week. So he listened.

“Well, it just so happens there’s something in Prague that I need your help with. Tonight.”

No surprise. He took another swallow of beer. “Kinda busy.”

“Investigating TF29, I know. But if you help me with this, we’re even, I promise.”

“Fascinating. Still busy.”

“Come on, Jensen. You dropped in on me out of the blue with a depressed stranger, and I fed you, clothed you, put you up, patched things up with Sarif—”

“Sort of.”

“Okay, well, he paid you without making you sign anything. How much more did you want? Anyway, then I got you in the Collective’s good graces and helped you save your new cop buddies from a grisly and embarrassing death on that train. And let us not forget that, if not for my wise and thoughtful counsel, Faridah would have found out from someone else that you were back from the dead and promptly re-interred you.”

Jensen grunted.

“And through all of that, did I ever complain?”

“Yes. Loudly, if I recall.”

“Ugh. Well, be that as it may, I really think you’re overlooking a prime opportunity to do your two favorite things.”

He wondered what Pritchard thought those were. He wondered what he thought, himself. “Do tell.”

“Brooding and kicking in doors, of course. You get to brood over my onerous request, clearly so out-of-proportion to helping you extricate yourself from the rubble of your old life and get started on a new one.”

“Hah. What about the doors?”

“To a police station—a satellite location in Ver—uh, Verso-vise.”

Jensen sighed. “It’s pronounced Vr-sho-vi-tse, and we call them ‘precincts.’ You forget I’m a cop myself? I can’t just go busting down the door of the station.”

“I seem to recall you doing exactly that, back in Detroit. And besides, it’s for a good cause.”

Pritchard had him there, damn him. “Christ. Fine. What’s the cause?”

“A friend of mine was helping me with some research when she went dark. Based on what I’ve managed to access of the police files—surprisingly well-encrypted, by the by—they picked her up and took her to this ‘precinct’ of yours. But not officially.”

“No booking records? No charges filed?”

“Yes, those things. None of those. So you see why I’m worried.”

“This friend of yours.” Jensen put his credit chip down on the bar and twitched his head at the bartender. “She Augmented?”

“Precisely.”

“A hacker?”

“One of the best. Not as good as I am, of course, but very much in my league.”

“Of course. She got a name?”

“On the darknet, she goes by ‘ShadowChild.’ I don’t know her real name, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Jensen paid, stood, and collected his coat. “‘ShadowChild’? Jesus. So you want me to cross town, break into a police station, and break out an Augmented woman whose real name I don’t know before she gets disappeared by the PČR into Golem City?”

“Pretty much.”

“You know what she looks like, at least?”

“Um… her avatar is a stylized domino mask. Here.”

An image popped up in Jensen’s link of two blocky chevrons connected at the tips, like a pair of arrowheads. The left was black; the right, white. It didn’t look much like a mask to him. It was captioned “Shadow(hild,” with a parenthesis. Of course. “And this is supposed to help me… how?” he asked. He shouldered his way out the door as Pritchard stammered a non-reply.

Jensen exhaled in frustration and dug out a cigarette, shielding it from the wind that skirled between the old buildings and whipped his coat around his knees. “Fine. Forget it. Who needs intel anyway?” He cut the call on Pritchard’s indignant sputters and stalked into the night, trailing a plume of smoke.

Tolkien said trans rights 🏳️‍⚧️

Eat the rich. 💫💫💫

I think in this new age of A.I. the general public is going to need to increase their photography and lighting literacy. The response to this photo has just been a shit show.

There are people pointing out perfectly normal edge lighting and misunderstanding how reflections work.

First the plane is parked at an angle. The tail is farther back than the nose. But also that is a curved surface and it tapers. It's reflecting the area to the right of the photo.

And the bottom of the plane is reflecting what is directly underneath. Which is the tarmac, not the crowd.

It should also be noted that photo was shot with a very telephoto lens and everything is super compressed. The crowd appears much closer to the airplane than they actually are.

But then someone who should have good understanding of lighting said this...

And now I'm worried for her clients. Because that's very... wrong.

Well, wrong-ish.

First, let's try to understand why this photo is setting off some alarm bells.

The crowd toward the rear is in shadow, but they are still very well exposed. But then there is also a bright light source creating a strong edge light on them. Looking at this photo with just the context of what is in it, there are some things that seem uncanny.

The information we do not have is the people in the shadow area are inside a very brightly lit airplane hangar.

So they have artificial light blasting them from the top.

But that light is still much dimmer than the sunlit areas outside so they appear in shade. But we are used to shade being much darker than areas in direct sun. So the balance seems off in our brain. We expect the people to be darker because we don't have the context of the bright hangar lights above them.

But the other issue is that the photo was post processed. It wasn't manipulated. The pixels weren't changed. But the exposure balance was altered.

If I were to guess, the original photo looked more like this...

But newer digital cameras can have 13 to 15 stops of dynamic range. And if you shoot in RAW, you can easily lift shadows and bring down highlights. You can balance the exposure so the dark parts aren't as dark and the bright parts aren't as bright. This photographer might have overdone it a bit in this case, but this is a fairly standard edit used to bring balance to photos.

And lastly, where does the edge light come from?

Edge lighting or backlighting or rim lighting (all the same) should probably be called wrap-around lighting if you want to be more accurate.

It comes from a homogenous light source that is larger than the subject being lit. So with my knife photo, I placed it on a large LED panel light.

The light source was bigger than the subject so it wrapped around the edges.

And I'm afraid the airplane is not nearly large enough to create a light source to wrap around everyone in the crowd. It isn't even reflecting direct sunlight. So I'm sorry to say that lighting designer was mostly mistaken despite the confidence.

The light source is... everything.

That entire red area I highlighted is the light source.

As well as everything above and everything to the sides.

And the biggest aspect of that light source would be the sky above. I think people always forget the sky is a light source. If you are seeing blue, you are seeing light. And I guess the plane is included in that, but that entire highlighted red area is so bright, and so filled with sunlight bouncing around, that it creates basically a giant softbox. It becomes a huge single light source for the people in the hangar.

If you look at footage taken from way inside the hangar, you can see the camera adjusting exposure for the crowd inside, but look at what happens to the sunlit area outside.

What does that look like?

A giant softbox.

A single homogenous light source blasting light inside the hangar.

The sun is so incredibly bright that even when it is not directly lighting something, the light just bouncing around outside is enough to overpower the very bright hangar lights.

So, what have we learned from this?

Perhaps people should hire me to be their lighting designer.

Though I'm sure she is actually very talented. She seems to work with stage lights and this is more physics and photography.

Phystography.