Movie Artemis Fowl: Dresses Like A Child Should, Loves His Father, Enjoys Surfing And Skateboarding,

The idea of being a villain in Pokémon is SO FUNNY like youre in this word where you have little creatures that are powered by good vibes and friendship and you can bond with them and play with them and stuff and you’re like no I think we need to establish an organized crime ring or blow up the planet or both

KH games come and go but Xehanort is eternal

Things that Dazai is Officially Not Allowed to Do at Meetings, a By No Means Comprehensive List Assembled Over the Course of Several Months - by Kunikida

1. Refer to the collective members of the Armed Detective Agency as “Fukuzawa and the Fukuzawettes”.

2. Attempt to chime in to discussions by quoting the battle speech from Braveheart.

3. …Or any other, completely unrelated scenes from Braveheart.

4. Underscore anyone’s speeches by shouting “Amen!”, “Can I get a witness?”, or “Cowabunga!”

5. Underscore anyone’s speeches by waving one of those giant foam fingers from sporting events.

6. Underscore anyone’s speeches by playing dramatic music in the background.

7. Okay, who the hell gave Dazai a kazoo?

8. Giggle every time someone uses the word “duty.” Seriously, are you five?

9. Make a series of straight-faced, somber-sounding comments designed to include the word “duty” as many times as possible.

9a. [Amended, after the giggling proves contagious.] Okay, now nobody is allowed to say “duty”, are you happy?

9b. I wasn’t laughing, I was coughing, and anyway, that’s not- look, can we move on?

10. Anything involving sock puppets, for any reason.

11. For the purposes of 10, “sock puppets” also includes puppets not made of socks.

12. Okay, who the hell gave Dazai his kazoo back?

Every single odd number has an “e” in it.

я не говорю по-русски, но вы возьмете свою странную фотографию лошади, и вам это понравится, мудак.

Oof

stop everything, this is bitty doing research for his thesis

there's more lmao, unhinged bitty energy

Wait, what's wine forgery? How would you fake wine?

VERY EASILY, MY FRIEND. BUCKLE UP.

First of all, you gotta understand that wine is BIG BUCKS. Old and rare vintages can sell for tens of thousands of dollars or even more to wealthy collectors at auctions. A single bottle of 1947 Cheval Blanc sold for $300,000 back in 2010. And a lot of 114 bottles of a rare Romanee-Conti sold for $1.4 million in 2014.

And it turns out that high-end wine is dazzlingly easy to fake. Only a handful of people have ever tasted the rarest vintages in the world; and how the bottles were stored, if they were exposed to sunlight or kept in darkness, if the bottle had been opened or kept sealed, or if the environment was humid or dry can affect the wine’s taste, especially after decades or centuries. So who knows what a bottle of 1785 Lefitte actually tastes like? Can anyone actually tell it apart, with certainty, from a hypothetically-much-less-valuable 1784 of the same vintage?

Considering that some of the greatest wine-tasters in the world have also been dupes of some of the biggest wine scams in the world, I’m gonna say no.

There are definitely flavors associated with old wines, even specific vintages of old wines; but you don’t need to shell out for a pricey bottle to top off your fake. Get a cheap bottle of old wine and mix it with some nice quality, younger wines, and no one will be the wiser. Million-dollar wine forgers like Harvey Rodenstock and Rudy Korniawan do exactly that.

It gets even easier when you think that a lot of the people who buy these ultra-pricey bottles never even open them. They’re not for drinking! They’re an investment, or they’re a prestige item, something you take down from your shelf to show off to your friends once in a while. You could fill the bottle with grape juice, and who would ever find out?

So how are you supposed to tell a real bottle from a fake one? The bottle itself? The label? Wine bottles are nothing special; get one made in the right couple-of-decades as the vintage you’re faking, and there’s nothing to tell them apart. Some of them have etched signatures, but those were done with simple hand tools, that you can still buy today. And the labels are no security at all. They’re just paper, ink, and paste. People today are forging the holograms off of $20 bills; you could convincingly fake a wine label using a standard laser printer.

Wine forgery is a HUGE problem in the wine world today. Tracing the provenance of any particular bottle is next to impossible. And frankly, the money in the business is just too good for anyone to want to ask too many questions. The head of Sotheby’s auction house’s international wine department joked that more bottles of 1945 Mouton were consumed on the 50th anniversary of the vintage than were ever produced in the first place. 

The question isn’t how do you fake wine: it’s how the fraudsters ever get caught. In Rodenstock and Korniawan’s cases, they just overplayed their hands. Rodenstock sold so many bottles of rare wine that a suspicious customer had a bottle carbon-dated, which revealed that it was two centuries younger than Rodenstock had claimed (and it still took years to take him down). 

As for Korniawan, he started selling a vintage so rare that, it turned out, it had never existed in the first place.

There’s a great podcast on this topic in the Stuff You Should Know archives, if you want to hear a whole lot more about this. 

Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

I have discovered a new enemy

The Nervous System