glitteraffe-art

[glitteraffe-art]

honest to god i was 90% convinced that christian pure spy was made up solely for yaoi with cbs cause i'd never seen a video including him in the wild. went and looked up the wiki over the weekend and i guess he is real huh

[glitteraffe-art]

ultraman arc latest episode muttering (under cut for spoilers)

man now that they finally exploded hellnarak what direction are they gonna go for the finale. i feel like the blazar crossover being more than two episodes long (like. significantly more! especially when the zangill episodes are included) has knocked my general sense of the pacing of the season out of whack. ultra seasons past ginga s are generally predictable with pacing but idk whats going on here

is it gonna be one of those two parters with no buildup? or are they gonna bring back the midseason villain

also so funny that alt universe ishido immediately figured yuma was arc. yuma i know youre trying so hard to keep it a secret but buddy thats the worst anyones ever done it

[glitteraffe-art]

this literally has no impact on anything but any time I see people make demo a Scottish fold (whether for a cat au or catboy…catman-ification?) im like. Aw man. he has severely painful joint diseases… and is probably self medicating with alcohol…

[glitteraffe-art]

shuro’s squad! toshiro haters dni

[glitteraffe-art]

anyways, for those who dont care about the twist, or went and watched it and are back now:

its got cloning, and specifically cloning in which the person cloned is not aware he is being cloned. it's got memory implantation. it's got the exploitation and deliberate sabotage/misleading of a small number of workers for the benefit of a huge megacorp. i truly think people interested in cloning theory/related memory-related tf2 angst should watch it because the best way to portray an idea is to take a look at other media which presents similar ideas.

slightly unrelated i'm not sure if you've ever seen Mission: HOME and MISSION: Arrival (parts of an SFM series by Dominzki), they present a somewhat similar setup with some key differences (mostly that the cloning is something Needed/Worked Toward instead of done in secret by a megacorp, but some other things too, just go and watch though, lol). anyways when i watched the series i was like "wow this really reminds me of Moon (2009). and now we're here

anyways to say anything more coherent about Moon (2009) in relation to the theme of cloning and exploitation of workers i would need to rewatch it in its entirety so thats all for now

god its been forever since i actually watched it but hey. listen to me tf2 fans who like inflicting angst upon everybody's favorite little war criminals, i am talking directly into your ear now. i need you to do me a favor. i need you to go watch Moon (2009 film directed by Duncan Jones) right now. don't look it up beforehand so u don't spoil the twist.

unfortunately i can't tell you why it's relevant to tf2 because doing that would also kind of spoil the movie. anyways its free on Pluto TV (does have ads but i use an adblocker)

[glitteraffe-art]

god its been forever since i actually watched it but hey. listen to me tf2 fans who like inflicting angst upon everybody's favorite little war criminals, i am talking directly into your ear now. i need you to do me a favor. i need you to go watch Moon (2009 film directed by Duncan Jones) right now. don't look it up beforehand so u don't spoil the twist.

unfortunately i can't tell you why it's relevant to tf2 because doing that would also kind of spoil the movie. anyways its free on Pluto TV (does have ads but i use an adblocker)

[glitteraffe-art]

i may not be smart

[glitteraffe-art]

russian roulette with the boys (by boys we mean detective smokesalot, new mexico's most catholic murder suspect, and a guy who will find out hell is 800,000 other people in the next five minutes)

(stock photo & quote sources under the cut):

quote from:

stock photos from:

https://knowyourmeme.com/forums/meme-research/topics/60260-hand-pointing-gun-at-screen

https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/long-barreled-revolver-with-a-black-plastic-handle-isolated-gm880976852-245339152?searchscope=image%2Cfilm

https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/hand-pointing-a-gun-at-the-target-gm516186054-88869963

https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/hand-holding-revolver-gun-ready-shoot-81031411

https://www.westend61.de/en/photo/PKF00085/man-holding-gun-close-up

[glitteraffe-art]

russian roulette with the boys (by boys we mean detective smokesalot, new mexico's most catholic murder suspect, and a guy who will find out hell is 800,000 other people in the next five minutes)

(stock photo & quote sources under the cut):

quote from:

stock photos from:

https://knowyourmeme.com/forums/meme-research/topics/60260-hand-pointing-gun-at-screen

https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/long-barreled-revolver-with-a-black-plastic-handle-isolated-gm880976852-245339152?searchscope=image%2Cfilm

https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/hand-pointing-a-gun-at-the-target-gm516186054-88869963

https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/hand-holding-revolver-gun-ready-shoot-81031411

https://www.westend61.de/en/photo/PKF00085/man-holding-gun-close-up

[glitteraffe-art]

Thank you so much, i'm glad you enjoyed it!

(deliriously) if medic gave himself dog teeth i would be willing to help him test those out. for science. and such.

[glitteraffe-art]

OK, thank you OP! I’ll hop right to it, then. My explanation isn’t very speculative biology, unfortunately, just a xenotransplant (that is, a transplant from another species).

CONTENT WARNINGS: Discussion of dental surgery on humans and animals; mention of potential animal cruelty.

DISCLAIMERS: I am not a dentist for humans or otherwise, but I know more than a non-dentist ought to know about the field (read: consequence of my job). Also, this may not be particularly well researched because this is For Funsies, and will contain speculations/best guesses/etc, but I will do my best to present accurate information.

With that out of the way:

SO YOU WANT TO PUT DOG TEETH IN MEDIC TF2’s MOUTH

Realistically, can dog teeth even be put into a human’s mouth?

Unfortunately, no.

Technically, once you have a (recently emptied) tooth socket, you can put something in there (historically, tooth implants have ranged from things like bamboo to metal to other people’s teeth). And animal tooth transplants into humans have been considered before; for example, Charles Allen suggested the use of baboon teeth in 1695. However, currently, tooth transplants are only used in very specific circumstances due to its generally high failure rate, and specifically from either one human to another human, or using another one of your own teeth. To make matters worse, if the tooth is not from a human with a close enough genetic match to you, you will experience transplant rejection.

Transplant rejection is when your immune system detects that this brand new transplanted organ is a foreign object that is not yours, and therefore attacks the transplant. The more genetically similar you are to the donor, the less likely a transplant will be rejected; identical twins (genetically identical) rarely experience transplant rejection, but a transplant from another species entirely is almost guaranteed to be rejected.

I’m not entirely sure what would happen with a cross-species tooth transplant rejection (since no one does that, because it WILL fail) but it would likely not be pretty (swelling and inflammation, pain and nausea, the teeth loosening from their sockets and falling out, etc).

Aww, shucks... Hey wait! This discussion is specifically within the context of Medic TF2!

We do have a saving grace here: Medic appears to have either:

- found a way around cross-species transplant rejection (since his whole gimmick is transplanting exotic animal parts into humans; for instance the different species’ hearts in Meet the Medic), or

- he can just ignore it for unclear reasons, the same way he can ignore blood types, debris, and bacterial contamination in the scene where he just pours blood back into people’s bodies. Judging by Ms. Pauling’s reaction, and Medic’s comment about medical school, it seems this is generally not something that people can normally do. My guess is that his deal with the Devil technically makes him some kind of witch, but that’s neither here nor there.).

So it could work?

In the specific context of Medic TF2, probably yes, but no procedure is without caveats.

So what happens?

Well, first thing first is to find a source of dog teeth that are of approximately the right size and shape to fit into your tooth sockets. Ideally, the donor teeth’s roots should be slightly smaller than the size of your tooth sockets, the size of which can be determined by taking an x-ray of your mouth (I don’t think the other imaging types had been invented yet in the 1970s).

Since dogs are domestic animals and come in a variety of sizes and shapes, it shouldn’t be too hard to find one that has about the right sized teeth. Plus, dogs, like humans are also omnivores and have roughly the same tooth type and arrangement as humans (incisors at the front; canines; premolars; molars in the back). Both of these facts makes things a little easier; another species with a significantly different size to humans, and a different diet (like, say… teeth from an elephant. Elephants are herbivores and only have four HUGE molars) would be a lot more difficult to theoretically transplant.

Teeth that end up being a little too large can be cut to size and sealed with a filling (probably dental amalgam- yay, mercury exposure!- or gold for this time period). The donor dog teeth can only be placed inside your existing tooth sockets (sorry, can’t drill more sockets without causing some serious jaw integrity/sinus integrity problems). As a result, there will be a couple extra teeth that will end up unused – humans have a max of 32 adult teeth, 16 on the top jaw and 16 on the bottom jaw, but dogs have a max of 42, with 20 on the top and 22 on the bottom.

The dog teeth can be harvested from a healthy live donor dog (under anesthesia), or from a recently deceased healthy dog. It would be pretty cruel to leave a live dog without any teeth; this significantly impacts its ability to eat and basically guarantees health problems and slow starvation; you COULD give the dog your removed human teeth in some sort of fucked-up equivalent exchange but I’m not sure a dog would be able to successfully adapt to having human teeth. Maybe you could give it artificial implants to replace its original teeth…?). Make sure the dog is healthy and has no diseases—as with any transplant, there is a risk of disease transmission.

If the donor dog teeth must be harvested a significant amount of time before the implantation procedure, they can be kept in liquid nitrogen for preservation. I assume the process of harvesting dog teeth would be similar to a human tooth extraction, but the shape of the tools used may be different to account for the slightly different tooth shapes. Additionally, the dog teeth would need to be thoroughly cleaned to remove plaque and debris since dogs don’t brush their teeth very often.

What next?

Well, the next thing is to remove your unwanted human teeth. Tooth extraction (and especially extraction of multiple teeth) would be incredibly difficult to do by yourself, due to the fact that it’s really hard to see into your own mouth, and doing surgery in a mirror is not ideal. Ideally, someone else, or better yet, a full team, would be the ones to perform the multiple tooth extractions. A single person might be able to do one or two at a time, but not much more than that. Unless, of course, you lean into Medic being able to ignore real-world limitations and just say he’s talented enough to remove a significant number of his own teeth and replace them using a mirror.

There is a lot of specialized equipment specifically for tooth extractions, such as luxators (knife-like, to sever the periodontal ligament, loosening the tooth from its socket), elevators (spade-like, expanding socket and lifting teeth), and forceps (plier-like, with a gap for the tooth, for grabbing teeth and removing them). There are plenty of variations of each, with specific functions, but I’m not going into detail on those since there’s a lot and I’m not that familiar with all of them. For example, all of the tools below are just variations of forceps, each for specific teeth:

After applying an anaesthetic of choice (local or otherwise), generally the tooth is lifted with an elevator and forceps are used to rock the tooth back and forth; once the periodontal ligament, which attaches a tooth to the bone of the jaw, is broken (or severed by another tool) and the socket is widened enough the tooth can be removed. Slightly different specific tools are used for each tooth type and tooth location. Surgery requiring cutting into the gum + drilling with a drill may be needed to remove some teeth (like those which break under the gum).

Now what?

The next part is to transplant the prepared donor dog teeth to the corresponding sockets. In total, we’d need 8 incisors, 4 canines, 8 premolars, and 12 molars (8 if you had your wisdom teeth removed).

The socket would need to be prepped beforehand to ensure blood supply. Once the donor tooth is in place, it is sutured down. Hopefully the arrangement of teeth allows for the mouth to more or less close; the canines may need to be cut to size (Maybe angling them slightly within the sockets, or possibly drilling the canine socket slightly more to allow an angled placement while being careful to avoid loss of jaw integrity?). It seems splinting the transplanted teeth to prevent movement out of place is used sometimes, but it appears it is currently debated.

Congratulations! You now have a mouth full of dog teeth. The swelling will be terrible for the first few days. Bite down on gauze, take your painkillers and the full course of antibiotics prescribed, do NOT drink through a straw (issue with the clots coming loose) and do NOT eat hard foods, or eat or drink very hot foods for a while (same issue). If it wasn’t for the fact that this is Medic TF2 we are talking about, you’d also have to take some very strong immune system suppressants to stave off the inevitable transplant rejection and eventual failure of the transplants. And, if you only replaced one or two of your teeth this time, be prepared to do it all again in a few months for the next couple of teeth.

Cool! Will this make my bite stronger?

Not exactly. Your bite strength is determined by your jaw muscles, the size of your skull and jaw, and the area of your teeth. Jaw muscles and jaw size are unchanged in this procedure. Sure, the points of your bite with the highest pressure on them will be changed simply because the shape and therefore area of your teeth have changed, however your jaw muscles are still the human ones you started out with. You’d have to do something about that to really get a better bite force.

Will drooling be a problem?

Depends on how the teeth fit into the mouth. With a good fit that allows you to close your mouth and lips completely, you should not have a drooling problem. However, if the teeth are the wrong size and any of the teeth stick out to prevent full closure, then yes, drooling may be a problem.

What about speech?

Yeah, there would definitely be enunciation problems, especially for the first couple of days (the swelling...). The shape of the teeth affects how you pronounce things, so a radically different set of tooth shapes would change how you pronounce things. Maybe permanently; without the human mouth shape it’s possible you might just lose the ability to form certain sounds entirely & have to make do with a close replacement, resulting in a lisp of some kind.

Is there anything else?

For the purposes of this theoretical dive we’ll assume the teeth were not rejected and healed up nicely due to the talents of Medic TF2. There’s no doubt that dog teeth would look very visually striking. But for maximum striking-ness (and more important things like an improved ability to close the mouth and a correct bite), the teeth need to be aligned. It’s very likely that after the transplantation and healing, your new dog teeth aren’t quite exactly aligned, so additional corrective dental treatment to move the teeth around (braces, probably, since they did not have Invisalign in the 70s, and potentially retainers to keep the placement) would likely be necessary. Additional cosmetic treatments like veneers to change the tooth color may be in consideration to get those teeth pearly white.

Also, if you do have to consider real-world transplant rejection, and aren’t a fan of animal cruelty, the easiest way to get dog teeth would just be to get (metal) dental implants for all your teeth and just have custom resin or ceramic crowns on top shaped to be like dog teeth. 100% less dogs harmed! You do need to worry about potential implant rejection, though-- sometimes the jaw decides it’s not a big fan of all those titanium implants.

...Why spend so much time and effort on this?

Unfortunately, I love explaining things with absolutely no bearing on the real world whatsoever to people online.

References (Hyperlinks removed since Tumblr dislikes them):

(Yes, Wikipedia unreliable, I know, but this is for funsies. Also, warning for the Wikipedia articles having bloody/gory photos of in-progress dental surgery.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth_transplant

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_extraction

https://www.iflscience.com/the-horrific-history-of-tooth-transplants-71985

https://tpis.upmc.com/changebody.cfm?url=/tpis/immuno/wwwHISTpart1.jsp

https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/000815.htm

https://www.purina.co.uk/articles/dogs/health/dental/canine-dental-anatomy

https://www.verywellhealth.com/teeth-names-5212767

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5932386/

Image source:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/1428473801/10-piece-dental-tooth-extraction-forceps

(deliriously) if medic gave himself dog teeth i would be willing to help him test those out. for science. and such.

[glitteraffe-art]

to all the overpowered top scoring enemy demoknights on freaky fair can you please LET ME WALK OUTSIDE SPAWN. PLEASE

[glitteraffe-art]

This is a pretty simple explanation of the topic, and does not cover every detail, but hopefully it is a nice overview!

Slide text in text form, and reference and image source URLs under the cut:

Title Card: Cloning Mercenaries 101: How Real-Life Cloning Works

CW: Mentions of animal death (in a research context)

Slide 1: Foreword

If you're into TF2, chances are you've come across fanworks depicting the "clone theory" to explain why there's more than one of each mercenary.

Clone theories generally fall into the categories of either respawn/teleportation cloning, or biological cloning. Today, we'll focus on real-life biological cloning.

"But TF2 is a Looney-Tunes comedy! Why bother with the science of a fairly common, but minimally supported headcanon?"

It's always worth understanding how the real-life version of something really works!

Slide 2: What is Cloning?

"Cloning" broadly refers to the process of producing individuals who are genetically identical to another individual. It can include single- and multi-cellular organisms.

Cloning includes both natural cloning (like plant cuttings, asexual reproduction) and artificial cloning (like cloning DNA fragments, cells, and organisms).

"Reproductive cloning", is the cloning of a multicellular organism to create a new genetically identical individual.

Engie speech bubble: Natural cloning is more common than you may think: for example, plants grown from cuttings are clones of their "parent"!

Slide 3: Reproductive Cloning

There are 2 methods of reproductive cloning for mammals:

Embryo Splitting

- Used to create identical twins from 1 egg and 1 sperm cell after in-vitro fertilization (IVF)

- Not really for cloning an existing adult so we won't focus on it.

Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT)

- Used to create a number of clones of an individual organism from 1 body cell (somatic cell) from the organism and 1 donor egg cell

Engie speech bubble: We’ll be focusing on SCNT here!

Slide 4: Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (Diagram)

1. Nucleus removed from body (somatic) cell of individual to be cloned (by pipette)

2. Nucleus removed from donor egg cell

3. Somatic nucleus placed into empty donor egg cell

4. Resulting egg stimulated and begins to divide

5. Resulting embryo transferred to uterus of a surrogate mother to develop.

Slide 5: Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer

The resulting clone embryo is not 100% identical to that of the individual to be cloned.

- The body (somatic) cell's nucleus may have contained mutations

- The mitochondria (powerhouse of the cell) of the resulting clone embryo will be the donor egg's mitochondria

That's right! If the donor egg is NOT from the individual or their matenal line (mitochondria are passed down maternally) the resulting clone embryo will NOT be 100% identical.

Engie speech bubble: With different mitochondria, a clone may have differences in body parts with high energy demand, like muscles, heart, eyes, or brain.

Slide 6: Dolly the Sheep

Some methods using the principles of SCNT were used as early as the 1950s (based on earlier work in the 1920s) to clone amphibians.

The first successful mammalian clone using SCNT was Dolly, a cloned sheep born in 1996 in Scotland, and announced to the public in 1997.

Dolly eventually developed severe arthritis and a progressive lung disease and was

euthanized at age 6 despite sheep's average lifespan being 11-12 years.

Engie speech bubble: Dolly was named after Dolly Parton!

Slide 7: Some Downsides

Inefficiency & Failure Rate:

SCNT has a high failure rate - many clones die during gestation, and newborn clones may die of abnormalities. For example, for Dolly, 277 fertilized eggs -> 29 embryos -> 3 lambs born -> only Dolly survived.

Advanced Aging(?):

Due to Dolly's age-related diseases it was speculated her DNA was already genetically "old". Later studies of further clones found no evidence of having age-related diseases, but the idea of "advanced" or "accelerated" aging of clones made its way into pop culture.

Engie speech bubble: More recent cloning using SCNT have reported higher success rates, but still have many failures.

Slide 8: What Does this Mean in TF2?

A resulting baby born from SCNT will, in fact, be a baby. The baby will NOT have the memories, experiences, muscle mass, or, well... anything past genetics, of the individual they were cloned from.

In terms of TF2, a lot of time and money would need to be spent raising, feeding, and teaching the resulting baby for the next 18 or so years to get anywhere close to a useful mercenary. Not very efficient...

Engie speech bubble: In short, you'd need to look beyond realistic cloning

and take some sci-fi shortcuts to get already-adult clones as often portrayed in fandom.

REFERENCE URLs

(Removed the hyper links since Tumblr likes to hide posts with hyperlinks)

Image of Dolly is from here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/february/22/newsid_4245000/4245877.stm

I mainly referenced these while writing (Yes, Wikipedia unreliable, I know, but this slideshow is a for-funsies TF2-themed general explanation and not an academic essay):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK223960/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_(sheep)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_cell_nuclear_transfer

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloning

I also looked at these when trying to determine if the Wikipedia information was reliable:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK223969/

https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory_and_General_Biology/General_Biology_(Boundless)/17%3A_Biotechnology_and_Genomics/17.01%3A_Biotechnology/17.1D%3A_Reproductive_Cloning

https://www.britannica.com/science/cloning/Reproductive-cloning

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3790123/

[glitteraffe-art]

anyways, somewhat related to the last post:

does anyone have any links to TF2 clone theory posts. or fics or fanworks with particularly detailed or thought out implementations

there is also an older infographic post i remember seeing with respawn cloning using a punch card system that i can't find now, so if anyone has that it would be Much appreciated

(im like 6 pages into a draft document about how real life cloning works (for funsies) but i wanna see what other people think)

[glitteraffe-art]

>looking for TF2 clone theory variations

>ask the op if their theory is creepy or wet

>they don’t understand. I pull out illustrated diagram explaining what is creepy and what is wet

>they laugh and says “its a good theory sir”

>take a look

>its wet

[glitteraffe-art]

I just... wanted to be friends...

[glitteraffe-art]

This was my piece for the @cypher-zine 's CYPHER vol. 2! Go and check it out if you haven't already!