jumpingjacktrash:

profmeowmers:

My bros I have been doing a lot of reading about Wacky WWII Hijinks lately and I want to tell you a story because I love it okay

once upon a time there was a dude in Spain named Juan Pujol Garcia. Pujol was a chicken farmer. Pujol hated him some goddamn fascists.

See Spain had recently ended its civil war, with the fascists taking power. So when WWII broke out in Europe, Spain technically remained neutral but in practice was buddy buddy with the Nazis. Juan Pujol Garcia thought this was pretty bullshit

so soon after war breaks out Pujol travels to his local British embassy and goes “hey I wanna spy on the Nazis for you”

“who the fuck are you?” say the British, and kick him out

but Pujol is not deterred! He still wants to dunk on some fascists, so now he goes to his local German embassy instead. “hey” he says, “I wanna spy on the British for you, I sure do hate them”

“yeah okay” say the Germans “that seems pretty legit”

and just like that Pujol now officially works for the Abwehr, the German intelligence agency. They hand him some spy gear (invisible ink and such) and instruct him to travel to Lisbon, and from there make his way into the UK. So Pujol heads to Lisbon, and a little while later writes to his German handlers telling them he’s made it to England

Pujol had not made it to England. He had, in fact, made it to the Lisbon public library, where he checked out a number of English guide books and set about just wholesale making shit up

this is slightly complicated by the fact that, for example, he completely did not understand British currency and all his expense reports were basically gibberish. He also reported things like bribing Scotsmen, because the people of Glasgow would “do anything for a litre of wine” (an actual quote) because, hey, people in Spain like wine so that’s probably the same right?

Here is where it starts to get really crazy, because the Abwehr loves this. “wow this dude is a great spy” they say, because apparently none of them had ever been the England either. In fact, they are so pumped about this new awesome spy that the British start to get worried

you see, by this time the British had cracked German’s supposedly unbreakable Enigma code and were totally dunking on the Nazis by reading basically all of their ~super top secret~ radio transmissions. And, crucially, they’d become so good at breaking and reading traffic that there were literally no German spies in England. The Germans would set up a spy drop (usually dropping dudes in by parachute in the middle of the night), the British would intercept the message and then just scoop the dudes up as soon as they landed in a move that must have been SUPER embarrassing to the spies

so there are no German spies in the UK because they’re all sitting in a prison run by MI5 (although some are being run under supervision as double agents, feeding Germany bullshit). But suddenly MI5 is picking up all this traffic from the Germans talking about their super great spy- a spy the British do not have in their jail

“oh shit” says MI5, and starts rereading all the transmissions they have to and from this mysterious super spy.

“hey wait” says MI5, upon actually reading the shit the spy was sending. “someone is playing silly buggers, pip pip cheerio”

At this point, Pujol, still in Lisbon, had actually been approaching the British embassy again, repeatedly, but apparently “I am literally an Abwehr agent and would like to offer you my services” wasn’t interesting enough, because he was repeatedly turned away, again. It wasn’t until MI5 started asking around that one of the embassy staff was like “oh yeah we know that guy”

so in 1942 the British finally make contact with Pujol and he officially becomes a spy for MI5. They move him to London and assign him a case officer so he can start making up even better bullshit

and he does. Once actually in London, Pujol reports to the Abwehr that he’d recruited a whole slew of informants- from a bunch of Welsh Aryans to disaffected army officers. He ends up with a network of 20+ sub-spies, all feeding him information from around the UK

none of these people actually exist

Pujol just straight up invented like 20 people, keeping careful track of their fake personalities, names, and activities. With the help of MI5, the information he sends becomes even better- a mix of true but ultimately useless facts and actually important intel timed to arrive in Germany just slightly too late to be of any use. He and his “spy network” become the Abwehr’s most trusted agents

Pujol, now codenamed Agent Garbo (for his acting skills), ends up playing a huge role in the run-up to D-Day, where the Allies mounted a huge intelligence campaign to convince Hitler that the planned site of attack was going to be Calais and not Normandy (this was Operation Fortitude and you should absolutely look it up for more Wacky WWII Adventures). Obviously you know how this ended

crazily enough, the Abwehr never figured out that Pujol was a double agent. After the war he received both the Iron Cross Second Class (which require personal authorization from Hitler), and a Member of the Order of the British Empire (from King George VI)

unable to resist being totally fucking ridiculous, Pujol turned down MI5’s post-war offer to continue spying, but this time against the USSR. “no,” he said “just help me fake my own death and then I’m moving to Venezuela”

and that’s exactly what he did. Juan Garcia Pujol died in 1988, at the age of 76

yeah i’m gonna need a movie about this guy

mortxviventx:

I’m trying to prove a point to my cat

nanodash:

amalthea-oberon:

unseelieaccords:

marquessbrie:

ultralaser:

thetruenomenfictus:

fromthemindofatwentyorotherlycan:

idhren:

elodieunderglass:

zamboni-whisperer:

elodieunderglass:

beezelbubbles:

elodieunderglass:

petermorwood:

luminescent-love:

youaresogayskarth:

finnickodaired:

barackinaroundthechristmastree:

WHAT COLOR ARE MIRRORS

let’s reflect on this

fun fact! mirrors reflect each color equally, except for green. if you have ever seen a mirror perfectly aligned in front of another mirror, a.k.a. an infinite mirror, you can look through it and see that it becomes greener and greener. therefore, mirrors are technically green!

holy shit

The glass is greener over here. Not a typo.

If you look edgewise through a sheet of glass you see that it’s green because of iron impurities (Google for it). Reducing the iron reduces the green.

Perfectly aligning mirrors to multiply reflections also multiplies the apparent thickness of the glass, and the green tint becomes more apparent the “deeper” each reflection seems to be.

Science is like history: it was never this interesting at school. :-)

Yep! And this is because - I’m sorry to say - mirrors are not a unique or separate substance with magical properties. Mirrors are silvered glass. They have two colors: the color of the silver, and the color of the glass. The “silver” doesn’t have to be silver, though it usually is because mirrors are traditionally made with silver nitrate, because it’s a whitish metal. You can have mirrors silvered in gold or black or red. You take literally any piece of glass, pour a coating of silver on it, seal it, and call it a mirror.

You have to seal it because otherwise it tarnishes and spots. Even though the glass protects it from air, the silver oxidizes just like any other silver, which is why antique mirrors have that funky age-spotted look.

Mirrors used in science are usually pure clear glass with no impurities (so the glass has no color) and are silvered in gold or aluminum, so they are white or gold. A warm-toned mirror would have a pink glass and would make things have a rose-gold look. Phryne Fisher, in the books, has a mirror with pink glass.

(Mirrors silvered in silver - that is, most mirrors you’ve seen - are probably faintly grey from the silver and faintly green from the cheap glass, but it doesn’t need to concern you at all - even if you noticed a strong color, you’re often so used to looking in them that your brain edits out any discrepancy - like how your nose doesn’t get in the way of your vision even though it’s right in front of your eyes all of the time.)

My grandmother had a mirror that was silvered in gold. It was a little disconcerting. The silver in mirrors is why vampires don’t have reflections. (And why the cutlery at Castle Dracula was made of gold.)

IS THAT TRUE ABOUT THE REFLECTIONS BECAUSE IF SO THAT CHANGES ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING???

It’s true!  (Source is The Journal Of I Read It Somewhere One Time, so take it with a truckload of salt, but I’m pretty sure it was a published book and not the internet, so like, only a pickup truck, not a dump truck.)

Watsonian explanation:  Silver as an entity and/or concept was upset about being used to pay Judas, so as some kind of compensation God gave it evil-fighting powers, and this is why vampires don’t have reflections in silvered mirrors as well as why werewolves are killed by silver bullets.  (Also works for vampires not showing up on film, because silver nitrate, although obviously that isn’t part of the ~*~original folklore~*~ and also doesn’t explain digital cameras.)

Doylist explanation:  A lot of things that are traditionally anti-vampire turn out to have antibacterial properties- the only ones I remember are garlic and silver, but I think there were others- so supposedly when anti-vampire treatments helped somebody out of a decline or whatever they were actually helping fight off an infection.

@elodieunderglass

Ahahaha I love the conversations we have

A lot of things that are traditionally anti-vampire turn out to have antibacterial properties

So would that mean vampires are weak to antibacterial soap?

The power of hand sanitizer compels you!

antimicrobial soaps were just banned by THE VAMPIRE CABAL

@unseelieaccords @t-raith @tarnishedcoins @harry-the-lizard

Does that mean that a vampire would see themselves in a gold mirror but not a silver one?

What about a gold mirror with antibacterial soap or something sprayed on it?

And if it’s the silver in the cameras that made them not show up on film, that means that digital is entirely different (unless they use silver in the manufacturing - which i’m pretty sure they don’t - or if some rich person has a silver encased camera - but that still probably wouldn’t work because the lense couldn’t be encased in silver otherwise it wouldn’t work) so basically we need a modern story where the Vampires are having to come up with clever things to stay out of photos where possible because DIGITAL, but there’s that one vampire who photobombs everything and is famous on the internet for it because he’s literally everywhere.

@chipofftheoldsoul @moonlitfandom @marian-ette @iviegh @megupic

Some good scientific discussion in this thread