• she/they/it 🏳️‍⚧️

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grey ace, adhdtism


hobbyist game developer, professional procrastinator, and kink trash goblin


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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

i was just linked an article about a Ridiculous Thing that happened in the UK, and not ten minutes later i feel like i just plunged headfirst through ice into a freezing river. i feel like i've fallen through the sets of reality and am running breathless from the sound of the langoliers' chomping jaws


the kernel of the situation is this: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13127687/immersive-willy-wonka-event-glasgow-police.html

someone, for unknown reasons, decided to spontaneously throw a - presumably unlicensed -willy wonka themed "event." i do not know all the details behind it, and i will not bother looking into it much deeper because two weeks from now someone like dan olsen is going to deliver a 45m summary on the absolutely batshit backstory that certainly lurks behind this disaster, you can count on it.

in short, it's dashcon for kids - they promised some "immersive event", filled a website with AI generated images, and could not actually deliver anything remotely like what they depicted. what they did deliver is truly bizarre however, in unexpected ways.

the whole joke of dashcon is that no actual work was put into it - the famous ballpit is a kiddy pool, something you can buy off amazon and just inflate and you're done. this is much weirder: these appear to be largely custom props, some assuredly quite expensive. how did these come into being? were they scavenged from some legitimate production? but then the guy behind this surely would have known they were not enough to pull off the scheme, so why go through with it knowing the obvious outcome?

or did he get a loan that he thought was enough to make it all happen, then never did any of the math, just started ordering set pieces and only then realized that $30,000 is not really a lot of money? but then, again, why go through with it? it'd be one thing if like, people showed up to an empty building and the guy had fled the country, that's just a basic scam, but he bothered to rent a space, he bothered to put props in it, he hired a performer, and he was there. there's no possible way this man thought he was performing a scam. he must have thought this was going to work, and it's not clear how that's possible.

the thing is, as strange as all that is, the name of his "event company" is so much weirder to me: "House of Illuminati." what even is that, that's nothing. so on a whim, just wondering what i'd get, i google it, and the very first result sends me reeling.

i learned the following facts:

  1. the UK apparently has a bureau, ministry, department, whatever you want to call it, that keeps track of businesses, and it has the incredible name of Companies House

  2. the URL is, somehow, the phishingest domain name in the history of the internet. there is not a single "computer person" alive who would not react the same way that i did to it - namely, to first jerk the mouse away to avoid a clearly machine-generated honeypot, and then to double-take, blink, and rub ones eyes, unable to believe the TLD is really what it is. the domain is as follows:

find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk

i feel like i've left earth right now


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

Just to say that the whole Gov.UK TLD is populated with surprisingly competent web engineering and was the subject of great national pride in the UK. They ran their own internal cloud platform for cheap, rapid-deployment of new sites, which was a key part of the covid response.

Until December 2023 when the whole thing was kneecapped and deprecated and the teams responsible scattered to the four winds, right around the time the current government realised they weren't getting re-elected and could, in fact, salt the earth.

Someone will come along shortly and tell me I misremembered this thing but hey it's 8:30 UK time they can cut me some slack.

God, Brits can't have anything nice can they? I'm sorry, that sucks to hear, I always thought gov.uk was a great example that even government departments can do useful things well if you give them money and people who care. Apparently nothing exists that is worth spending money on which could be withdrawn and siphoned off to political allies 🙁

"companies house" is a great name for a body that registers your motley crew of ship-tarring dockmen or your dusty tinderbox of a millinery or your beaver-fur-importing business from the dominion of canada and less so my dreary sole-proprietor freelance web dev biz but i had to do it anyway when i lived there

this post is like looking at my environment through the walls of a glass box and going, huh yeah it's kind of funny in there

any way back to my computer job where i frequently need to look things up on companies house

It's not uncommon here in Australia (Another Commonwealth country) for a federal/state/territory government (or even a particularly large private organisation) to be named department of XYZ, and have it's headquarters be named "XYZ House" or similar. And for its executive actions to be referred to as "XYZ house decided that..."

I felt sure "Companies House" was a case like this. But apparently it literally is just called Companies House.

oh man i'm tumbling down a rabbit hole learning all kinds of fun facts about the founder of house of illuminati and his many endeavors (ai-generated conspiracy theory novels on amazon! a fake degree in religious pseudoscience! a sketchy food bank!)
he seems like a deeply strange person