hi everyone, accidentally made something terrible again, sorry
as it turns out when you find as many user created skeleton models as possible on the steam workshop and rig them all up at the same time it does not result in an accurate and complete human skeleton
One of the most bizarrely cool people I’ve ever met was an oral surgeon who treated me after a ridiculous accident (that’s another story), Dr. Z.
Dr. Z. was, easily, the best and most competent doctor or dentist I’ve ever encountered – and after that accident, I encountered quite a number. He came stunningly highly recommended, had an excellent record, and the most calming bedside manner I’ve ever seen.
That last wasn’t the sweet gentle caretaking sort of manner, which some nurses have but you wouldn’t expect to see in a surgeon. No; when Dr. Z. told me that one of my broken molars was too badly damaged to save, and I (being seventeen and still moderately in shock) broke down crying, he stared at me incredulously and said, in a tone of utter bemusement, “But – I am very good.”
I stopped crying on the spot. In the last twenty-four hours or so of one doctor after another, no one had said anything that reassuring to me. He clearly just knew his own competence so well that the idea of someone being scared anyway was literally incomprehensible to him. What more could I possibly ask for?
(He was right. The procedure was very extended, because the tooth that needed to be removed was in bits, but there was zero pain at any point. And, as he promised, my teeth were so close together that they shifted to fill the gap to where there genuinely is none anymore, it’s just a little easier to floss on that side.)
But Dr. Z.’s insane competence wasn’t just limited to oral surgery.
When I met Dr. Z., he, like most doctors I’ve had, asked me if I was in college, and where, and what I was studying. When I say “math,” most doctors respond with “oh, wow, good for you” or possibly “what do you want to do with that after college?”
Dr. Z. wanted to know what kind of math.
I gave him the thirty-second layman’s summary that I give people who are foolish enough to ask that. He responded with “oh, you mean–” and the correct technical terms. I confirmed that was indeed what I meant (and keep in mind, this was upper-division college math, you don’t take this unless you’re a math major). He asked cogent follow-up questions, and there ensued ten or so minutes of what I’d call “small talk” except for how it was an intensely technical mathematical discussion.
He didn’t, as far as I can tell, have any kind of formal math background. He just … knew stuff.
I was a competitive fencer at this point in time, so when he asked if I had any questions about the surgery that would be necessary, I asked him if I’d be okay to fence while I had my jaw wired shut, or if it would interfere with breathing.
“Fencing?” he said.
“Yes,” I said, “like swordfighting,” because this is another conversation I got to have a lot. (People assume they’ve misheard you, or occasionally they think you mean building fences.)
“Which weapon?”
“Uh. Foil.”
“No, it won’t be safe,” and he went off into an explanation of why.
Turns out, he was also a serious fencer – and, when I mentioned my fencing coach, an old friend of his. (I asked my fencing coach later, and, oh yes, Dr. Z., a good friend of mine, excellent fencer.) (My coach was French. Dr. Z. was Israeli. I never saw Dr. Z. around the club or anything. I have no idea how they knew each other.)
So this was weird enough that later, when I was home, I looked Dr. Z. up on Yelp. His reviews were stellar, of course, but that wasn’t the weird thing.
The weird thing was that the reviews were full of people – professionals in lots of different fields – saying the same thing: I went to Dr. Z. for oral surgery, and he asked me about what I did, and it turned out he knew all about my field and had a competent and educated discussion with me about the obscure technical details of such-and-such.
All sorts of different fields, saying this. Lawyers. Businessmen. Musicians.
As far as I can tell, it’s not that I just happened to be pursuing the two fields he had a serious amateur interest in – he just seemed to be extremely good at literally everything.
I have no explanation for this. Possibly he sold his soul to the devil.
I actually feel sorry for the likely unpaid intern sitting at tumblr HQ dealing with all our bullshit and snark while those actually in charge watch the world burn from a safe distance and blame it on us damn kids not buying more products. Because ultimately this is what this about. Verizon needs to make money from Tumblr, and Verizon can’t make money cause Apple says “no adult content” and Apple has a stranglehold on the app market.
The fact that a lot of us use tumblr to host our own services and products as independent creators, often as our only source of income, is irrelevant to them. The fact that to many of us this is our community is meaningless to them. We’re acceptable collateral damage to furthering corporate greed and that’s the fucking tea on that.
Also to the hypothetical unpaid intern: leave, sweety. You can do better, and you’re worth so much more.
I thought Apple removed the app because of the CP though ?
Not that I don’t think Apple is evil or don’t have a stranglehold on the market, but
if the removal was specifically because of the pedophilia then
that was a more than fair decision. Come to think of it, if it was because of all the porn bots it was also pretty fair. Tumblr should have gotten its shit together way earlier about that and if the whole “no adult content” thing is wholly their decisions then this mess is on them for not being able to manage their own website, panicking when there’s finally some consequences and deciding that trying to ban all “adult content” instead of dealing with the actual problem is the way to go
(so yeah hypothetical intern might want to find a better, not completely incompetent place of work)
The CP is what forced them to roll out changes quicker, but otherwise this NSFW ban has been in the planning for quite some time. They were always planning to do this.
That whole “oh we rolled back the filtering system” that happened a while ago cause the algorithm was bullshit? Was them testing it to see a) how well it worked but also b) how we’d react.
But because, and this is all through the grapevine stuff and “anon sources” who were willing to talk to Vox (source), Verizon haven’t been putting any money into Tumblr since they bought it, the engineers that run the site have been jumping ship left right and center for better gigs (without being offered any reason to stay), so there’s been increasingly fewer staff to maintain or make changes, so the filter is still bullshit, still broken, and the site is only going to break further as time goes on cause no money is going into maintaining the basic infrastructure. So it doesn’t just seem like things are broken and no one is fixing it, things actually are breaking down, and there’s not enough people with the know how to fix it.
Tumblr is like the house built on sinking sand at this point. It just so also happens to be built on top of a tire fire as well, and the “discovery” of a CP circuit was just the thing that made them go “oh shit oh god oh shit” when Apple finally got sick of their shit and pulled the app. (And Apple is notorious for not allowing apps “that contain user generated content that is frequently pornographic” or for trying to muscle them out of site out of mind (source)(source)(source) so to the people in the notes going “uuuh they allow snapchat???”, yeah, for now. It also likely has different age restrictions and details in their ToS compared to the android one, where the rules about apps are a lot more lax, something which Steve Jobs himself was snarky about (source).)
Jesus Christ I’m so mad at myself for not knowing about any of this until now
Don’t be! The facts are only just now starting to emerge as people are becoming willing to speak out and talk, but also, some of these things are well hidden!!
Big companies pay big money for you to never know these things about them, they scrub their google returns clean so that most of the time all you will ever find are positive results. Most people didn’t even know that Yahoo had been acquired by Verizon until recently. Some people still don’t.
Misinformation is how chaos thrives, and chaos can often be capitalized on provided it’s a carefully curated kind. All of this?—laughable as it is to say, was planned. Poorly planned, and even more poorly executed, but premeditated all the same. As is anything that is done by a corporate company.
This is why things like Net Neutrality did and do matter. This is why telecommunication companies developing a monopoly over the Internet was a bad idea. This is why so many of us have been freaking out while others call us tin foil hatters go “ugh come on guys, it’s not a big deal” because it does matter! The small things matter! Because the small things eventually make up the whole and sometimes the whole turns out to be a big steaming pile of mass censorship in favor of profit. And that’s a Problem.
So don’t be mad at yourself. Not when it’s time to get mad at them.
i am absolutely dragging myself through grading my last 6 papers, it is 9:30pm, and one of my favorite students has just used the phrase “Satan and his Gucci gang” in his milton essay
PTA archive 