Yearly candy needle hoax contest, you get an expert in forensics to judge, but you all compete for the most convincing fake

Its a contest that's two tiered, you have your story and you have the candy sample. So part of it is making sure the two line up

The twist is the second place winner gets the prize, the first place goes to jail, we can't have you running around in society

My quick questionnaire for analyzing Halloween needle report stories:
1) Where and when did it happen?
2) Do they note the specific neighborhood they claim to have been trick or treating?
3) Did a parent report it to the police themselves, or did the police issue a warning after seeing a social media post?
4) How old is the kid(s) that had the candy?
5) Who found the needle in the candy? Child or parent?  (Pay close attention here, because sometimes parents will say they found it but the details show the kid told them first)
6) How was the needle found? From cutting into the candy? Breaking it in half? Biting into it? Magnets? (I can tell you right now, magnet is an auto-disqualifier)
7) One of the most telling things of all: does the report say that the child was HURT as a result of the needle?  Especially in cases where they were reported to have bit into it?
Last, of course, try to find the original facebook post (it's almost always a facebook post) and look closely at the photos.  Think about the logistics of the story told, think about what the candy would look like if these events happened in this order, etc.

Me being the person I am, I decided to do some experiments with sticking needles in Halloween candy, because I had some mini Twixes that I was going to eat anyway lmao and twix/snickers are the most popular Halloween Needling Candies.  I was primarily concerned with: how hard is it to put a needle in candy, how clean does it come back out, and can magnets find it

First of all, it's clear why they're the most popular, you can pretty easily stick a needle in a Twix if you get it started then press it against a table.  If it's in the wrapper you're not gonna crush the edge too bad and frankly kids are gonna beat this candy up anyway.

I'm curious what one looks like after it's been getting beaten up in a bucket with other candy for an hour or two, but I'd rather not go to jail if I get caught walking around the neighborhood alone with a twix with a needle in it in my possession.  But if I remove the needle right away, it comes out....about 90% clean I'd say.  The needles in photos are always suspiciously clean, but a lot of it (for a Twix anyway) does kinda get wiped off by the cookie part.  You should expect some candy stuck in the eyelet though, but most people's photos aren't really clear enough to spot that kinda detail.

The main thing I realized though is, these parents waving magnets over the candy?  Fucking absolute waste of time.  I grabbed the strongest magnets I have, my big fuck off harbor freight magnets that are hard to even pull off of my toolbox, you don't feel SHIT waving them above a needle in a Twix bar.

Tomorrow I might see what a razorblade in an apple does with a magnet, I'd imagine that'd be more effective maybe, but if I do that right now then I'm committing to eating an apple and that's just not how my evening is going.

Happy Halloween, remember that candy needling stories are hoaxes and the more you fearmonger over them the more you encourage actual kids to hide needles in candy themselves as a hoax
https://d-shoot.net/candyneedlers.html

anyone remember this classic game?

My problem with responses to the Proton debacle is how quickly people immediately put their trust in another company

Assume that companies are all run by these dipshits and you just haven't heard about it yet

Dallas needs to become the new Columbo where inexplicably a bunch of people start watching it now

I don't know how people have secret girlfriends on the side because I feel bad enough when I'm helping two people remotely at work at the same time and suspect they can tell I'm not giving them 100000% of my attention

Parents, PLEASE check your kids Halloween candy for PHP CVE-2026-109618

Uh, the whole Plex player team got laid off today?
Seems pretty bad for Plex.  I already jumped ship to Jellyfin because I saw the writing on the wall with where Plex was headed, this type of project needs to stay stupid hacker software, the second it becomes paid it's not going to go anywhere good, not even just in a "boo capitalism" way but in a "they are never going to monetize software people use to watch pirated shit the way they'd need to so the second that becomes an expectation there's a problem"

lmao christ i see that dansup once again posted the exact same kind of emails i get just for owning literally any domain offering to buy the site, and insists that it's a serious non-scam offer for pixelfed

just uh...keep this in mind when he brags about turning down millions for the site ok.  he thinks those emails are legit.

Share with me an image you saved thinking you'd use it as a reaction image but haven't really found any use for it and have no idea what you thought it'd be good for in the first place

For me it's this

sorry i'm just learning that they were just going to call dynasty "oil", and also just learned about the daytime soap "texas" (which, being a daytime soap, had about twice as many episodes as dallas in just 3 years)

the rules say a dog can't play basketball
but j.r. ewing doesn't play by the rules

I want to know what countries these are that hate autocorrect so much

Autocorrect, and I mean regular autocorrect and not this shit Google is doing where it's trying to have AI rewrite shit as you type, is something I find very necessary on smart phones because cramped touchscreens are not designed for typing well without missing letters

I know not everyone likes using autocorrect but I've never seen someone so angry about it

And when you add search engines into the picture, it's a different story but it's...the same story.  It's less about whether a page is static html or dynamically rendered, it's about how often it updates.  Engines like Google really want to show you the latest and greatest results.  Except...if what you want to know is information about a 1962 issue of TV Guide, the information about that issue has not changed in 1962.  It does not matter if the website result was made in 1998 or 2026.  There is no reason for constant updates for some information.  This was a huge pain in the ass when I was looking up PalmOS stuff, because there's still a lot of old PalmOS websites still online, and they still have most of the information I needed!  But search engines don't want to surface that, because their ranking works on the principle that newer is better, and that surely some random nostalgia article about "remember palm pilots????" from this year is more useful than a website nobody has touched in years with hundreds of PalmOS app downloads still live.

Biggest problem with the modern web, largely in terms of search engines but also in website design, is understanding when information can and should just be static.  You do not need to query a database every single time you retrieve information that last got updated before we had the internet.

This is the biggest thing I realized when I started working on Born Into TV, like...if I am making an archive of TV Guide information, that information is the same as it was when it was published.  The cover artist for a 1981 TV Guide is the same cover artist from the day they printed it.  The articles inside have not changed.  NOTHING about the content itself has changed.  Now, having a database of that information is fantastic, because it makes making these pages a lot easier, it means that if I want to change something about how they're presented I can regenerate all the pages easily, and it means I can do new things with that data.  Eventually I will certainly want a way for end users to query that database as well, if they want to find out some sort of information that I didn't think to make a page for or search for some specific piece of info, so the entire site can't necessarily be static.  But 99% of the site has no reason NOT to be static.

Why does a page that just shows you the text for an article from TV Guide in 1956 need to query the database every time it loads?  Why does it need to be anything other than static html?  I can simply run the script I wrote to regenerate that HTML when changes are needed, because they will be very rare.  For instance, maybe I don't have a page made yet for a specific article, so I don't want a dead link on the issue page for that article, and later I do have that page so I need that link added.  Great, I regenerate it one more time and it can be static again indefinitely!

Especially for a site that is acting as a resource, it gives the page so much more longevity too.  No frills html pages are easy for most devices to load and easy for stuff like Wayback to archive.  Site goes down?  There's a good chance you can still access the info that was on it.  And that data is what I'm concerned about.