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Perhaps David Tracy is into the Japanese art form Wabi Sabi?
Now I feel the need to google that Medscape article
My buddy, an engineer, takes classes at a pottery studio. One day his wheel was squeaking, so he asked one of the staff if it was still ok to use. They glanced at it for a second, shrugged, and went back to doing artist things. His head exploded: HOW could they NOT CARE about a NON-nominal NOISE????
I, as the innocent bystander, took immense joy from the artist-engineer interaction, and it’s a fantastic moment that I will never let my buddy forget.
BTW: as the more practical engineer, I agree that the squeak was not ok and needed to be checked. However, it was not an alarming squeak and so there was no reason to disrupt our pottery session to fix the issue.
So I was curious how much poop related content was on the Autopian. Quite a lot it seems, even removing shitbox showdown.
This obviously.
https://www.theautopian.com/back-in-the-1970s-an-rv-supplier-wanted-you-to-burn-your-poop-in-your-campers-exhaust-as-you-went-down-the-highway/
https://www.theautopian.com/why-your-car-might-poop-out-hair/
https://www.theautopian.com/an-allegedly-leaked-memo-from-a-jeep-engine-plant-calls-out-whoever-keeps-smearing-poop-all-over-the-place/
https://www.theautopian.com/researchers-figured-out-how-to-run-a-nissan-leaf-on-rum-seaweed-and-sheep-poop/
https://www.theautopian.com/this-220000-camper-is-a-bizarre-trapezoid-that-collects-rainwater-and-burns-your-poop/
https://www.theautopian.com/the-blue-stuff-in-an-airplane-toilet-has-a-name-and-its-embarassing-you-dont-know-it/
https://www.theautopian.com/how-the-annual-saab-owners-meet-turned-into-a-literal-shitshow/
https://www.theautopian.com/i-think-i-know-why-this-fox-keeps-pooping-on-a-ferrari-but-the-owners-not-going-to-like-it/
https://www.theautopian.com/how-i-got-my-navy-callsign-by-shitting-myself-in-an-f-a-18-fighter-jet-twice/
Btw the comments seem to be having a bout of irregularity, they keep disappearing while I’m typing.
Sorry about that! Our spam filter took your comment for spam due to the high number of links. It’s sort of hilarious that the filter blocked a comment with links to our site.
> a bout of irregularity
How apt
Was expecting a reference to the Tesla restaurant story.
I was literally just typing the same thing. I had to look up the name (couldn’t remember if it was Cafe or Diner), otherwise we’d have posted within seconds of each other.
Opps
Even if it weren’t a gross/disgusting topic, it’s totally standard and normal and advisable to strip ads out of a screenshot you’re using….like….so normal.
More normal than shower spaghetti.
I thought this was going to be a story about *David* having uncontrolled diarrhoea for 6 months…
Would explain David’s sudden bouts of urgency to get stuff out.
I, too, expected to hear about David’s bowel problems, and am so relieved–for multiple reasons–to find out that’s not the case.
I am also relieved that the story is not about the editor in chief relieving himself.
I was expecting a story about David getting a great deal on surplus fruitcake of dubious origin, and Jason at the last moment preventing him from shipping it to members as a winter solstice gift.
The beauty of fruitcake is that it is both always and never safe to eat. There’s no Milquetoast “this will give you the runs” half-assery with fruitcake.
I bet you could eat a fruitcake found hidden away in an English church since 1276 and it’d be fine.
“ That’s our promise.”
I shall hold you to that promise!
Clostridioides difficile for the win! (Link available)
I’ve a gut feeling what that link is referencing. As I’ve already spent many biology classes discussing it, I feel no need to click that link and revisit it again.
To be perfectly honest, 6 months of explained diarrhea needn’t be any better.
Diarrhea runs in your jeans. So I wonder if baby Delmar will also copy and paste?
“I Prevented David From Subjecting All Of You To Six Months Of Unexplained Diarrhea”
And here I thought you were going to tell us you reminded David YET AGAIN to not leave the wheelbarrow of shrimp out in the sun again.
I’d bet on the Shower Speghetti as the likely culprit. On some unknown bug that lives off rust.
Unknown jeep.
Unknown bugs are Jason’s thing.
Oh just wait till you try the wheelbarrow shrimp shower scampi.
The unknown bug that lives on rust is David Tracy himself, he just has a human suit on.
I thought David subjecting people to 6 months of unexplained diarrhea was just the natural result of the gathering at his old house before he moved.
This is not an engineer thing, it is a David thing.
Engineers definitely believe in good enough is better than perfect because perfect never gets the job done, but this is ridiculously not good enough that literally 30 seconds of work would fix. Also did David never work at a place with a quality system (maybe not – he did work for FCA), because his position implies that he wants to post without any review or inspection – there is a reason engineers do design reviews with other engineers (who hopefully didn’t also work on the project…) and factories have quality inspectors.
When I was reading the story, I assumed that Jason wanted to remove the play button in the center of the top image, which would have taken five minutes to get a hot tea and fire up the AI photoshopping app. The actual edit wasn’t really even an edit it was just cutting out shit that needed to go.
It does make you wonder what David was searching that this ad was served to him…
Also Jason is not a “JAFA” (just another artist) he is deeply technical and reasonably mechanically inclined and can rebuild and repair ancient computers, and has experience effectively making great content, a little respect had been earned.
Are you saying all engineers don’t bury beer bottles in their yard and wash their clothes in used motor oil?
In my experience all engineers don’t bury beer bottles in their yard and wash their clothes in used motor oil. Just most of them.
Real engineers know you use Lestoil or Dawn to get grease and oil OUT of your clothes.
I’m just relieved this isn’t a story about you talking David out of some sort of fad diet that was tearing up his insides.
He’s not that California-ized.
This could have been the post that informed us he was that California-ized, but fortunately it was not.
Welcome to my world, Torch.
For twenty years, I have been a graphic artist in a company full of engineers who can’t see why having lights and shadows originate from a single source is important for realism. Who think “Just make it blue” is good enough. When you’re representing a 3D lever being pulled , IT CHANGES SHAPE. YOU CAN’T JUST FLIP IT!!!
When they make changes to my graphics, we even have a term for it now. It’s called “engineer quality artwork”.
I felt this. On e upon a time, I was a graphic designer at a manufacturer of polyvinyl products. Once the Big Boss emailed me a photo of a traffic cone with some writing on it and asked me: “Rotate the cone 180 degrees in Photoshop so I can’t see the writing on it.” Flummoxed, I pixel-edited the text off the cone and sent the picture back. He didn’t complain, I went on with my life.
I do wonder what happened to the poor sap who did that job after I left, how did he react if given the same request, and did they tell him: “Well, the last guy could do it!”
> Once the Big Boss emailed me a photo of a traffic cone with some writing on it and asked me: “Rotate the cone 180 degrees in Photoshop so I can’t see the writing on it.”
Amazing.
If they were my age they probably took a mechanical drawing course in highschool where everything was rendered in orthographic projection.
Of course it works for the Sims.
Somewhere in my collection of lenses I have one that works like that, but the thing you are photographing has to be smaller than the lens. It’s used for inspecting parts in machine vision systems. It’s a pretty weird device. Removing perspective breaks your brain.
Not all of us engineers are like this I swear! I really enjoyed graphic design in high school and still dabble in some Photoshop work for fun, on an ancient copy of CS2 (good enough for my skill level). I really dislike when engineers pretend good-looking things don’t matter, when i guarantee they care in their personal life.
Good eye there Torch!
It is easy to blame David, he’s probably teaching Baby Delmo to Cut and Paste and with the volume of work this one slipped by. In 20 years it may prove to be a good investment for all involved.
Baby Delmar NHRN probably did the screenshot in the first place. David, being the great boss he is, didn’t want to snitch on his employee doing shoddy work so tried to pass it off as NBD. Secretly though, internally he was fuming at Delmar making such a rookie mistake.
So many euphemisms for diarrhea. “Ass-blastery” was maybe my favorite and certainly novel.
A college friend who drank about a quart of freshly pressed raw cider at a roadside stand on road trip announced “I have had a fart of both high viscosity and volume” when he pooped his pants in the back seat of my car a half hour later
Holy crap!
Sorry about the back seat of your car. I hope it was vinyl.
Missed opportunity for an Autopian/Drew Magary/Defector crossover event.
Torch, you’re right about the art and such being important.
So it’s not a follow up to that Saab story a while back?:
’They Were All In The Bathroom,” How An Epic Diarrhea Storm Ended This Year’s Saab Owners Convention
I mean how many headlines about diarrhea can an ostensibly automotive site have?
My family was engineers, artists, and architects.
The engineers and architects arguments were epic, the engineers and artists got along fine mostly.
Well my parents studied economics for some reason, then switched to farming and ceramics, but everybody else was.
Oh, and we had a dairy farm with an about 5 acre manure pond, so I have some experience in the world of feces too.
I work in civil engineering, so deal with a lot of architects. While I’m not an engineer myself, I certainly am in that camp.
I constantly have to remind myself that we need both architects and engineers; without engineers, buildings would fall down and without architects every building would be identical.
Humanity demands both.
My grandmother was an architect, and designed my grandparents (and parents) house so that a particular mountain was framed by a floor to ceiling window on the other side of the house when you opened the front door, and when the sun rose and set on certain days of the year it would shine into particular rooms and hallways. Also the roof extended out over big stone slabs to the south, shading them in the summer but allowing them to absorb and radiate heat in the winter.
Anyway, the bricklayers and carpenters were of the realign everything to the building materials school and everything was a few inches off. After about 3 days of work this became apparent and she had them move the doors and windows to where she wanted them, apparently it involved sawing a few inches of hundreds of bricks. Apparently the Stonehenge nature was going to be a surprise as in “oh look the sun shines through the center of the house on your birthday!”
It may have been that the entire house was rotated a few degrees from what she wanted, or my grandfather the civil engineer thought that if she had told him when he surveyed it he would have made sure. He was also a serious amateur astronomer, and a tile in the hallway was laid out to match the relative orbits of the planets in the solar system, so I’m almost surprised he didn’t catch on earlier.
Anyway, that came up in arguments for at least the next 25 years. I of course thought that was normal.
Perfectly illustrating the importance of communication. That house sounds amazing!
Actually it depends I am a big fan of one way communication that whole listening thing just lets others think their opinions matter. Then you have janitorial staff opining about what is the proper medical procedure is for well 6 months of diarrhea.
“one way communication that whole listening thing just lets others think their opinions matter”
That sure explains a lot about you…
It isn’t?
> My grandmother was an architect
No matter how old you are, that’s not something you read every day! She sounds like she is/was an interesting person.
Now we need a car-related story about a 6-month bout of brown milkshake of death.
6 months has to be some sort of record, have we followed up to see if that poor bastard is still alive?
Definitely dehydrated. Wait maybe if Mercedes gave her cars automotive diarrhea it would keep the mold from growing? This is the type of ideas I give my idiot boss when he tells me to think outside the box or be creative because he has no idea how to get the impossible metrics that the company demands
Thanks Torch for catching that shit early in its run