tinycattheorist

[tinycattheorist]

Fun fact! Helping seems to be an innate human behavior because it has been consistently shown to occur in infants way before their parents have had the chance to educate them on right and wrong, and even before the children are able to speak themselves!

“humanity is inherently selfish and bad” bbbrrrghuhjfkg. humanity is seeing a stranger’s grocery bag break open on the sidewalk and harvesting fruits and veggies from the branch-like cracks of the asphalt for them, just because you can. humanity is helping a lost child find their mother on a crowded beach, looking for the ladybug-patterned parasol with their hummingbird-small hand in yours. it’s an elder’s fingers wrapped around your arm as you help them up the stairs because the elevator is broken, and feeling like you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing, like this is what you would’ve been doing had you been alive centuries or even millennia ago. there will always be a heavily pregnant woman who will smile at your when you give up your seat, a nice blind man in the fruit aisle who will ask you to please pick the riper plantain for him, a tired cashier whose face will light up when you compliment their tattoo sleeve. humanity is connection

[tinycattheorist]

Start Unconditional Basic Incomes (UBI) throughout the EU

https://eci.ec.europa.eu/014/public/#/screen/home

23/04/2022

https://eci.ec.europa.eu/014/public/#/screen/home/allcountries

If you’re not an EU citizen or can’t sign please pass the info to EVERYONE you know, so they can help spread it!

(That means reblogging this, not just liking it … )

If the EU manages to get this implemented, it could really improve quality of life for everyone not just those living in the EU.

If this get’s of the ground no western governemnt has an excuse to not at least try the UBI!

[tinycattheorist]

Knowing a fic author through AO3 is like attending someone’s thesis presentation and politely clapping at the end, knowing a fic author through this hellsite is like going over to their house at 3AM to watch them eat mayonnaise out of a jar

[tinycattheorist]

self care

[tinycattheorist]

viktor smiles

for @alimsurana

[tinycattheorist]

Jayvik Fic Masterlist

Series:

Game Theory: A non-linear tale of their divorce era and posterior reconciliation. Most can be read as stand-alone. 

Non-zero Sum Game (E) - PWP. The One Where It Begins

The Prisoner’s Dilemma (M) - The One Where They Apologize

Hobbesian Trap (M) - The One With Drunk Jayce

Nash Equilibrium (M) - The One Where They Go To A Congress

Bayesian Game (M) - The One With The Calendar

An Interlude of No Statistical Significance I (E) - PWP. The One Where Jayce Jerks Off

An Interlude of No Statistical Significance II (E) - PWP. The One Where Viktor Is Jealous

One-shots:

A lesson in Chaos Theory (E): Arcane-era. Viktor does not know how to deal with emotions.

Occam’s Razor (M): Modern AU. Jayce has a bisexual crisis. They meet at a bar.

Cherry Picking (E): PWP. Jayce makes a deal with the devil to save Hextech. Viktor has to be the most confused incubus in the world.

This Is A Love Song In My Own Way (E): PWP.  Jayce eats Viktor out. That’s it, that’s the plot.

[tinycattheorist]

My kind of himbo

[tinycattheorist]

“this is the hill you want to die on?” oh no i just love arguing. i fully intend to leave this hill once it gets boring. sorry for the confusion!

[tinycattheorist]

I am sorry,

What is OneID?

oh jesus christ

OneID was a Yahoo scheme. I'm not sure how much I can reveal here, but given that Marissa Meyer is long gone and this water is very much under the bridge, it doesn't really matter. What happened was probably one of Yahoo's worst and most nefarious efforts to bring Tumblr into the Yahoo ecosystem:

So, you ever go to a website and it allows you to sign up for the service and create an account using your Google, or Apple, or Facebook login? That's called Third Party Authentication. What it does is it uses your valid account on a website that has a strong authentication process to prove that you're a unique human being.

You log in to these third party sites (i.e. Google) via their authentication process, they (Google) return a unique token to the website (whatever site is using the third party auth). The token can be verified again to confirm it says "yes, this person's legit", and the website uses this process to authenticate/create your account with their service.

This is kind of hard to explain without getting technical, so you can compare it to, say, using your passport to verify your identity when you try to open a bank account. The bank trusts the passport, provided by a another institution, as verification that you are who you claim to be.

Anyways, Yahoo saw that Google was providing 3rd Party Authentication, and since they're Google's biggest competitor (ha!) they assumed people want a Third Party Authentication service from Yahoo too! Sign in to your favorite websites, using Yahoo!

So they made OneID! OneID was the name of their Third Party Auth. And they wanted all of their internal properties to use it, including Tumblr. The thing is, it only works if you have a Yahoo email address. Not a lot of people on Tumblr have yahoo email addresses. So, to make it easy for Tumblr, they had it set up so that when you use OneID to create a brand new account on Tumblr, you're given a Yahoo email address too! Who wouldn't want that?!

Well, Tumblr users didn't. At least that's what Staff assumed because Tumblr was, well, a bunch of teens and young adults who were net-savvy enough to not be caught dead using Yahoo anymore. Moreover, the sign-up process for OneID was, uh, way more rigorous than Tumblr.

To sign up for Tumblr, you need an email address, a password, and you have to tell them your age. Not your birthday, just your age. That's all Tumblr has ever needed, and was all they ever wanted to ask for from a user. The age was necessary because of laws about using the internet under the age of 13, and of course verifying if you're over 18 (because Tumblr had porn at the time).

To sign up for OneID, though, you had to, well, provide your Yahoo email address, or choose the name of your new Yahoo email address that was about to be bestowed upon you. You needed a password of course. And you needed to provide your date of birth. And your phone number. And, of course, most importantly, your gender. Male or female, please.

Staff took one look at this and saw the shitstorm coming down the mountain. Yahoo wanted your gender for marketing purposes, of course, but Tumblr knew that their users wanted to be as anonymous as possible. Moreover, OneID drops a "male or female?" gender check at signup and anyone who fell outside the gender binary was going to be angry. Staff did not want to anger its generally more progressive userbase than Yahoo's (old people? scammers?).

So, two problems:

1. Tumblr had to use OneID, they didn't have a choice

2. It was going to require all this extra info from new users

3. Yahoo wanted to force existing Tumblr users who signed up to use Tumblr with the regular registration process to re-sign up for Tumblr using OneID

It quickly turned into three problems.

Staff dug their heels in, hard. This was a herculean coordination between high-level stakeholders in the engineering organization, run of the mill engineers, marketing people, support staff, trust and safety, anyone who could find a reason to slow this project down or block it stepped in.

After months of going back and forth, Staff managed to convince Yahoo not to require a phone number for the OneID process, but Yahoo insisted on the gender check. So they compromised by providing a third, "fill in the blank" option where you could type in whatever gender you wanted. By this time, engineers had slowed the progress as much as they could, but enough work was done so that it was ready for initial, internal testing.

I was working on the testing part. Myself and other engineers ensured that the OneID on Tumblr internal test was going to be extremely rigorous! And it would take a while. I mean, it's gotta be secure, it's user authentication, right? First thing we noticed: it was broken as hell. I wish I could remember the technical details, but, at this point it's been too long. Myself and other engineers coordinated massive bug hunts, encouraging as many people within the company to test it as much as possible. You know, to be extra sure it worked properly, and to find as many bugs as they could.

The process found tons and tons of bugs, of course. One of the more curious ones was this: we noticed that if you set your gender as "female", or set your gender as the "fill in the blank" option, you'd get the same type of posts recommended to you during the Tumblr onboarding process. We asked Yahoo why this was happening, and it turned out that they just treated all accounts that chose the "fill in the blank" option as "female" on the backend. Great job, Yahoo. No one would have noticed that. And no, it was never fixed. It was considered "working as expected".

After a drawn-out testing process and more bugfixing, it was finally approaching production readiness. Keep in mind that, during this whole time, Staff was begging leadership not to do this. There were regular, very critical questions about OneID at All Team meetings where David Karp had to force a smile and talk about how great OneID will be for Tumblr. This project was Marissa Meyer's pet project and, ultimately, Staff could not stop it.

The last-ditch effort to block this was to suggest we roll out OneID slowly, using an A/B test, and compare how many people completed accout registration for Tumblr via OneID, vs how many completed account registration for Tumblr via the existing registration process. Can you take a guess as to what the results were?

OneID's new account signup (aka conversion) rates were abysmal. This resulted in more setbacks, negotiations, and tweaks on Yahoo's end to try to encourage users to finish the sign up process. But the users who ended up in the test bucket where they were forced to sign up with OneID never showed better conversion rates.

Then, one day, on slack, after much anticipation and rumors, our Director of Engineering made an announcement to everyone in the org:

"Yahoo authorized us to remove OneID from Tumblr".

We got drunk that day.

[tinycattheorist]

Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

I think the least we can do is remember them for it.

[tinycattheorist]

Me, the writer: "I should write the whole story before I post it."

Also me, the writer: "Let's post the first chapter now although I don't how to continue the story."

[tinycattheorist]

if you’re ever about to comment on a writer’s work and think, oh, they probably know how good they are, you’re definitely wrong. every time a writer posts or publishes anything, no matter how many years they’ve been doing it and no matter how many readers they have, they are struck with the idea that perhaps they aren’t very good at all.

if you think you’re annoying for commenting, or that we won’t see your comments anyway, you’re wrong. we see your comments. we actively look for them. we are starved for them no matter how many we get. we remember them and they fuel us. leave comments, even if it’s just saying “oh i like this”. i see an “oh i like this” and my heart grows three times its size and i am seized with an urge to provide you more writing just to hear you say “oh i like this” again.

[tinycattheorist]

Meanwhile, on Twitter:

Brain farts, a thread

[tinycattheorist]

Collab with my amazing dude @ferretwanted !! They did the sketch and lineart and I colored it on stream it was super fun 🤩

[tinycattheorist]

there's no way Viktor league of leggings can have no emotions when he literally has a robot cat and gives sad children choccy milk and has a stable homoerotic rivalry with a himbo

[tinycattheorist]

Uhhhhh

[tinycattheorist]

I keep hate-reading plague literature from the medieval era, but as depressed as it makes me there is always one historical tidbit that makes me feel a little bittersweet and I like to revisit it. That’s the story of the village of Eyam.