Tag Archives: suck!

Quora: What Went Wrong?

Posted on by
14

I am more active on Quora than any other social media site. I’ve been there since 2012, in which time I’ve written over 66,000 answers that have received over 1.3 billion views.

It’s no secret that the site has gone steeply downhill recently, with wave after wave of scammers and, now, ch*ld p*rn profiles growing like a cancer on the site. I recently wrote a very long answer about why that is, and how Quora’s policies and procedures basically rolled out the red carpet for people selling ch*ld p*rn (there are now a number of organized CP rings active on Quora). Quora deleted that answer, so I’m re-posting it, with expansions and addendums, here.

If you read this on Quora before it was deleted, feel free to skip to the end, where I’ve added new material.

Why is Quora allowing itself to become a spam and porn site? There are lots of real porn sites without corrupting what used to be an intelligent debate forum. Also, too much scammer spam. Why aren’t the moderators doing their job?

The moderators aren’t doing their jobs because, and I say this as someone who has interacted with many moderators and high level admins and had many lengthy conversations with them, because they cannot.

I don’t mean they can’t as in they don’t know how to…well, no, that’s not true. Some of them don’t know how to.

Sorry, this answer got really, really, really long. It’s my analysis of the many failure modes of Quora leadership and moderation based on hundreds of interactions with Quora employees, moderators, and administrators, including cofounder and CEO Adam D’Angelo, about tens of thousands of Quora scammers and spammers. It’s also based on multiple security issues and bug reports I have made to Quora, and what happened after, and on being stalked, doxxed, and harassed on quora (and having my father and my wife doxxed and harassed on Quora), and what happened after.

But you asked, so here we go.

*** CAUTION *** CAUTION *** CAUTION ***

This answer is my opinion, based on my experiences with Quora. I do not work for Quora (well, I might as well do, with all the bug reports and reports of scammers I send them, but I’m not paid for it), I have not seen Quora’s back-end code, and I don’t have any insights into Quora’s management beyond my personal interactions with Quora admins. So take this with a grain of salt.

Problem 1: Absent Leadership

Let me start at the top. I’ve met Adam D’Angelo in person twice at Quora-sponsored events. In person, he comes across as an introverted, painfully shy dude with limited or no theory of mind and no real understanding of how social media works. Stick a pin in that, we’ll come back to it in a bit.

These days, he’s an absentee landlord. He’s on the board of directors of OpenAI, and pays very little attention to Quora these days.

And yet, at the same time, I’ve talked to Quora mid-level employees who have expressed frustration that they would love to implement technical solutions to address some of the worst problems they see with scammers and spammers, but they can’t do so without sign-off from upper management, which is pretty much absent. That’s one problem. Quora is, from a leadership perspective, a rudderless ship, adrift without a captain.

Problem 2: No built-in anti abuse defenses

I run a very small Mac troubleshooting forum, and I also run half a dozen blogs. All of those sites have simple anti-abuse measures like flood control, dupe control, and username control. That means I can, for example, ban creation of certain usernames. That means, with the click of a button, I can stop this from happening:

And I can stop this from happening:

Quora can’t.

These are all user profiles that are active on Quora right now. Quora literally lacks the capability to block usernames with certain words or phrases. It was never part of the codebase from the start.

Quora also cannot do dupe control (flagging or blocking when a user posts the same word for word identical content over and over and over) or flood control (flag or block when one user posts 80 times per second, which obviously means a spambot and not a real human being).

In 1997, I ran a forum for a few years that had automated, built-in username filtering, dupe control, and flood control.

In 1997.

This is what I mean when I say that Adam D’Angelo has no understanding of how social media works. He was the CTO of Facebook, and he does not have the slightest clue how people use social media, how people interact with social media, or how people abuse social media.

Problem 3: Buggy code riddled with security holes

In December 2018, hackers penetrated Quora using significant security holes and stole the entire Quora user database. They got everything, including passwords, because Quora stored the user passwords in plain text, not encrypted, on disk.

This is Security 101. You never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever store passwords in plain text. The way every site, and operating system, stores passwords, and has since 1976, is you store passwords encrypted. When someone types a password, you encrypt it, then compare it to the encrypted password on disk to see if they are the same.

I had a TRS-80 as a kid in the 70s. It let you lock files on floppy disk with a password. It stored the password encrypted on disk so someone with a disk editor couldn’t find it.

Quora did not. Quora, a site with hundreds of millions of users, stored everyone’s password in plain text.

If that makes you deeply worried about Quora’s approach to security, you should be, because…

Problem 4: Quora’s codebase is an insecure mess

Quora has no Chief Security Officer. Quora’s codebase is riddled with security flaws, in part because they insist on writing their own code to do everything rather than using public libraries, and Quora’s developers from the earliest days onward did not know about and did not think about security. (See Problem 3. Nobody stores 100,000,000 users with plain-text passwords. Nobody.)

I have personally reported several security vulnerabilities that were actively being exploited to Quora. I’ve never heard back except for a bland “thank you for your bug report, we will pass it along to our developers.” In at least one of those cases, I saw the vulnerability being explited months after I reported it.

The vulnerabilities I reported all had to do with flaws in the way Quora handles Unicode.

Brief (I hope) technical digression about what that means: “Unicode” is a way to represent text characters. Computers were largely invented in the US and Britain, so they started out being able to understand only the uppercase and lowercase Latin alphabet, numbers, punctuation, and some special contol characters. That was it.

That means that for the first decades of the computer revolution, you could not type

Naïve

or

美丽

or

товарищ

For decades, you typed unaccented Latin characters or you typed nothing. No accented characters like the ï in naïve, no Cyrillic, sure as hell no Chinese.

Unicode was a system developed in the late 80s/early 90s to extend the old way that computers represented text, to allow for everything from accents to foreign-language alphabets to idiographic text to, later, “emoji” like 😮 and ✅.

The problem is that it had to be backward compatible with the old way to represent text or else every single computer program on earth ever written in English text would not work with the new system.

So the answer was a new way to represent text and symbols that still worked with the old system but added onto it to allow support for millions of characters, but that would still show old-fashioned characters right.

As you can imagine, Unicode is massively complex. Massively. Like unbelievably bogglingly complex.

Lots of people have written free open-source libraries for handling, storing, retrieving, and displaying Unicode. Quora refused to use them.

Instead, Quora wrote its own Unicode handling software. The thing about Unicode is that some characters are just represented by one-byte numbers (the uppercase letter A is represented by the number 97, or 61 in computer hexadecimal (base-16) numbers) and some are represented by two bytes (the lowercase a with a grave accent, à, is represented in Unicode as U+00E0), and some characters are represented as a list of instructions (basically “draw this letter and make these marks over it). Each mark is represented by a series of numbers.

That means that some Unicode combinations are illegal, not allowed, they don’t produce anything. These are called “invalid character sequences.” Invalid sequences are supposed to be detected and print as �.

Quora doesn’t do this. Because of bugs in how Quora handles Unicode, some invalid character sequences aren’t detected as being invalid. This is how trolls can create usernames that do not show up on Quora and can’t be clicked. If you see a troll answer where the name of the person who wrote the answer is just a blank, there’s nothing there, the troll is exploiting a flaw in Quora’s home-grown Unicode.

Worse, you can smuggle commands to Quora’s software by packaging the commands inside of invalid Unicode. This is similar to SQL injection but instead of wrapping the command in quote marks or SQL comment strings you wrap the commands in broken Unicode.

I’ve reported two different Unicode injection vulnerabilities to Quora. One of them was still actively being abused months later.

Problem 5: Quora does not take security or abuse seriously, and so Quora has become one of the favorite places for scammers and hackers on the Internet

Right now, Quora is struggling with a massive, staggering influx of people selling child abuse images.

I typically report anywhere from 100 to 300 or more romance scam and child abuse accounts to Quora every single day. I log and track every account I report. Yesterday I reported 164 accounts. 33 of those were offering child abuse images for sale, 23 were offering preteen child abuse images for sale, and 3 were offering toddler child abuse images for sale. I spend about an hour a day doing it and it makes me sick to my stomach but I cannot, I cannot stop doing it. I’ve tried. I just…I cannot see it and not do anything.

There is a site called Black Hat World. It is a site where scammers, spammers, computer virus distributors, ransomware distributors, child abuse sellers, and other scum and vermin get together to talk about ways to make the world a shittier place.

I sometimes read Black Hat World. They talk about Quora a lot on Black Hat World. They exchange tips and techniques for running scams and selling child abuse images on Quora. There are at least four organized child abuse rings operating on Quora right now [edit: five, I’ve found another], in addition to all the various random independent child abusers running on Quora.

Black Hat World loves Quora because of its combination of poor security, weak or nonexistent automated controls, and lax, permissive moderation. There are tutorials on Black Hat World for scammers and spammers wanting to do their thing on Quora. Actual step by step tutorials.

This all started because of this woman:

Well, not directly because of her, it wasn’t her fault.

This is Paige Spiranac.

Ms. Spiranac is a pro golfer and a model. Almost exactly two years ago, a romance scammer arrived on Quora and used stolen photos of Ms. Spiranac to run his romance scams.

I saw the account and reported it to Quora.

Nothing happened.

I reported it again.

Nothing happened.

I reported it a total of eleven times.

Nothing happened.

I emailed Ms. Spiranac’s agent and said, “hey, just so you know, your client’s identity has been stolen and her photo is being used as part of a romance scam operation on a social media site called Quora, here’s the profile that is using her photo.”

The next day I got a very polite email from Octagon Agency, the company representing her at the time, thanking me for my email. The day after that, the scam account was taken down, I assume because Ms. Spiranac sent Quora a legal DMCA takedown order.

But it was too little too late.

The scammer running the account ran to Black Hat World and was like “hey, everyone, there’s this site called Quora that permits romance scammers!” and the floodgates opened.

Now here’s the thing:

Any site that allows romance scammers will get flooded with romance scammers, obviously. But as the concentration of romance scammers rises, pretty soon there are tons of scammers competing for the same pool of lonely, gullible victims.

So the scammers start specializing. A new wave of scammers arrives who try to scam people with very specific tastes. They’ll pretend to be trans women to appeal to trans chasers. They’ll pretend to be BDSM dominants to try to scam thirsty, gullible subbies. They’ll pretend to be foot fetishists to appeal to people with foot fetishes.

If that second wave goes unchecked, then the third wave arrives, people who pretend to be underage children in order to appeal to…well, you know.

If that third wave goes unchecked, the child abuse rings are like “oh my God this site permits romance scammers that pretend to be children, we have free reign” and the fourth wave is people selling child abuse images.

This is exactly what played out on Quora.

It took about eighteen months between that one scammer going to Black Hat World and saying “hey everyone, run your scams on Quora” and the child abusers arriving in force.

There’s a lesson here: If you run a social media site, and if you do not crack down immediately and hard at the first sign of romance scammers, you will, you will attract child abusers. It’s inevitable.

At this point, Quora cannot keep up. Of the four child abuse rings I’ve seen here, each makes on average about 20 new profiles a day. You can tell who they are because they all use the same contact information for purchasing their child abuse images. You can tell they’re using bots because they all use word for word identical profiles, the same usernames, and the same images over and over again.

Remember Point 2: No built-in anti-abuse measures. Quora has no automated way to detect identical profiles, nor to block or flag based on certain usernames or certain strings in the profile descriptions. That means Quora moderators are having to do manual searches.

And they’re bad at it. Say a child abuse ring uses the name “Tina.” (This is an example; to my knowledge, they don’t.) They’ll use a bot to create identical profiles over and over. They might, for example, be

Tina-1207
Tina-1208
Tina-1209
Tina-1210
Tina-1211
Tina-1213

and so on.

Quora moderation will ban Tina-1209 and Tina-1211 but leave the others, because you have to do a hand search to find the others and it’s tedious.

That leads to two more problems:

Problem 6: Quora’s back end tools are badly broken

I’ll give you an example:

On my own Quora space, I will often write about the child abuse profiles I report to Quora. These posts often get deleted by Quora moderation.

If Quora would delete child abuse profiles as aggressively as it deletes Spaces posts about child abuse on Quora, we wouldn’t be here, but moving on:

When Quora moderation deletes a post in a Space, when I appeal, there’s a little dance I have to do.

Quora will usually send an answer that says “We cannot undelete this content because a Spaces admin deleted it.”

Then I send back “no, you deleted it, look at this” with a screenshot that clearly says Quora deleted the post.

Then I get an answer that says “we’re so sorry, our back-end administration tool shows that you deleted the post, it’s a bug in our moderation tools, we will undelete it” and they fix it.

I’ve done this over. And over. And over. And over.

They know there’s a bug in their moderation software, one that wrongly displays to Quora moderators that a Spaces post that was deleted by Quora was actually deleted by a Space admin.

You have to keep reminding them about this bug over and over because different employees handle the appeals and each employee doesn’t know about the bug so you have to tell them “look closer, there’s a bug in your software” and they’re like “Oh! Look at that, you’re right!”

They have never fixed the bug.

They have never trained their staff that the bug exists.

Every time, you’re starting from scratch because this poor training means Quora has no institutional memory of the flaws and bugs in their own site administration software.

This same sloppy, shoddy approach to their back-end tooling exists at every level of the Quora stack from top to bottom.

For example, a few days ago I went through another little dance with Quora moderation. I had an answer deleted for spam. Then I appealed, and it was undeleted. Minutes later, it was deleted again.

10:36: I got an email saying they’d looked at the answer and decided it wasn’t spam.
10:38: They undeleted it.
11:03: They deleted it again.

I appealed again and it was undeleted again. This morning, it was deleted again.

Quora’s tools have no provision for a human moderator saying “Quora moderation bot, we’ve looked at this answer, it’s fine.”

That costs Quora money, because every time this happens, a Quora moderator has to stop what he’s doing, check the answer again, and undelete it again.

There are a ton of other, more subtle flaws, too.

After Quora deletes a child abuse profile, they sometimes delete the profile description, which usually contains an address to buy child abuse images, and sometimes they do not; the profile will stay deleted by the profile description advertising child abuse images for sale, and the address to buy them, will remain.

I asked a Quora admin about this. I got a replay telling me it was a problem in their moderation tool and they’re “aware of it and working on it.”

What’s worse is that they never delete the profile Credentials, so the child abuse rings have learned to put the ads for child abuse images inside the credentials, where they remain visible even if the profile is banned.

I wrote a rather angry email to Quora admins about this and here’s what I got back:

Here’s the thing:

This is wrong. This is not correct. You do not have to visit the deleted profile by a direct link to see this. The screenshot above is not a direct link to the profile. A deleted profile’s credentials remain visible in countless places through Quora, including in other users’ Followers and Following lists.

Quora’s own admins and moderators DO NOT KNOW HOW QUORA OPERATES.

I don’t believe this Quora employee was trying to lie to me. I believe this Quora employee honestly, seriously doesn’t understand how Quora’s software works.

Problem 7: Quora’s moderators are incurious and not proactive, probably because they’re overworked and underpaid

Say you report a profile like Keanu-Reeves-359 for impersonation.

Quora admins will delete it. What they will not do is say “oh, if there’s a fake Keanu Reeves #359, I wonder if there is a fake Keanu Reeves #358. And a fake Keanu Reeves #357. And a fake Keanu Reeves #356.”

Nope. They will delete Keanu Reeves #359 and move on.

This is especially bad with the child abuse profiles.

If you report two profiles, one a child abuse profile that is using the name Tina-1208 and another, created a few milliseconds later and identical to it called Tina-1209, they won’t go “huh, a bot is making child abuse profiles one right after the other like a machine gun. I better look at Tina-1207 and Tina-1210, too.”

Nope.

They also don’t stop and ask themselves what profile names mean if they aren’t in English.

I reported this troll profile 7 times. The first time I reported it, it was banned a few hours later. I reported it six more times after it was banned because, well, see for yourself:

Quora policy forbids hate speech in usernames. When a profile whose username contains hate speech is banned, Quora is supposed to delete the username as well.

Which they usually do. If the username is English.

Six more times I reported this profile, explaining what the username means in English. Six more times they did nothing.

Why did I keep reporting it after it was banned?

Finally, finally, after seven reports, finally, after I emailed my Quora contact directly with a screenshot of the user profile AND a screenshot of Google Translate, finally Quora removed the username:

Quora is totally fine with a username “We Must Exterminate the Jews”…as long as it is not in English.

These problems, broken tools and incurious admins, arise from the next problem:

Problem 8: Quora has no money for, or apparently interest in, paying moderators, hiring developers, or fixing the toolchain

Quora started out with no revenue model. When Quora was first founded, it was pitched to investors as a site that would collect and distill human knowledge and make it searchable.

In 2019, it had a valuation of $2 billion.

Then ChatGPT came along and overnight iQuora lost three-quarters of its valuation, from $2 billion to $500 million, because investors were like “why would someone ask Quora if they can ask ChatGPT?”

That’s why Adam D’Angelo pivoted to AI and why he now sits on the board of OpenAI. It’s why Quora is a rudderless ship.

In 2021 or thereabouts, Quora started to run out of money. With the advent of LLMs, the venture capitalists didn’t see the value in Quora anymore. Its valuation collapsed by 75%. The VCs closed the money spigots and Quora was left to sink or swim on its own.

Quora responded by…

…firing the moderation team.

Adam is pitching an AI moderation bot for sale to other social media sites.

This AI moderation bot cannot look at usernames and ban based on users calling themselves Keanu Reeves or Elon Musk.

This AI moderation bot cannot say “this Telegram username is associated with a seller of child abuse images so I will flag or delete posts where this Telegram username appears.”

This AI moderation bot cannot automatically spot and ban profiles called “Fuck All N—-rs.”

Quora keeps trying to train their AI moderation bot to spot things like fake Keanu Reeves profiles or child abuse profiles using LLMs or whatever because once you’ve scaled to hundreds of millions of people and billions of posts, it becomes difficult to add basic features like flood control or username filtering after the fact.

They could do it, but it would be expensive, so they’re left trying to fine-tune their recipe for chicken cordon bleu while the entire kitchen burns down around them.

I’ve had so many conversations about the romance scam problem and the child abuse problem with everyone from frontline Quora employees to high-level Quora admins and I 100% believe that nobody, nobody at Quora, nobody understands the scale of the problem, nor how hard it is to get rid of these people once they’ve established a presence.

I actually have more to say, there are at least three more points in my head I could make including a significant worldview issue on the part of Mr. D’Angelo, but I’ve already spent hours on this answer and it’s way, way longer than a Quora answer should be.

If you’ve read this far, congratulations! Welcome to my world. As a user who genuinely loves Quora, it’s disheartening and kind of sickening.

I do love Quora. Quora’s been good to me. I’ve met so many people who have become personal friends in the real world outside Quora. I’ve met a lover and co-author here.

But it’s getting harder and harder to stay. I reported a string of profiles selling child abuse images of toddlers—toddlers!—yesterday and it made me want to throw up. When I was done I had to leave the house and go to a coffee shop to get the stain out of my head. It’s wearing me down and I still can’t stop, because if I’m not reporting these, who is?

tl;dr: Quora was founded by someone who doesn’t understand computer security or social media. Quora has never, ever been proactive about preventing abuse. As a result, Quora never implemented the most basic front-line security or anti-abuse measures, measures that were available in free open-source software in 1997, and now lacks the resources to address the problem.

Quora’s own employees also don’t understand Quora itself, their own software, or the scale of the problem in front of them.

I’ve saved this post. In the event Quora deletes it, which I put at about a 50/50 chance, I will make it available on my blog.

So that’s the Quora answer.

After I posted this, it was deleted by Quora admins, then undeleted, then deleted, then undeleted, then deleted again. As I type this right now, it’s still deleted, but I’ve filed another appeal so it will be interesting to see if it gets undeleted again.

Whilst it was available, several folks asked if I would expand on the part where I said I have more points to make, so here they are:

Problem 9: Quora’s algorithm is broken

Like most social media sites, every Quora user sees a different feed. There’s too much content to show anyone the firehose directly, so the Quora algorithm listens to your interactions to learn what content you want to see. For example, if you downvote content, Quora tries to show you less of that kind of content. If you upvote content, Quora interprets that to mean you would like to see more like that. The more you interact, the more Quora tunes your feed.

Trouble is, Quora sometimes gets its wires crossed.

Quora interprets downvoting and muting as negative signals, and commenting and upvoting as positive signals. But bizarrely, it interprets using the Report feature to report users or content as a positive signal.

If you report lots of romance scammers, you start to see more and more romance scammers. If you report spammers, you see more spammers.

Even worse, Quora sends customized “digests” in your email. I get a digest full of stuff that Quora thinks I might like to see in email every day. Usually it’s full of answers on topics like science or linguistics or computers or math.

Lately it’s been full of romance scammers.

I want you to take a step back and let the magnitude of that sink in. Quora sends out romance scam content in emailed digests. Today’s digest included nine pieces of content. Three of them were romance scam posts.

Problem 10: Quora is remarkably tolerant of sexual abuse

Amazon AWS is one of the largest Web hosts and storage engines on the planet. A staggering amount of content, including Quora itself, runs on AWS.

Whatever you may think of Amazon (and there’s plenty to dislike about Amazon), Amazon is fanatical about dealing with ch*ld p*rn. Amazon despises child abuse.

Amazon donates a tremendous amount of money, millions a year, to support the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

Amazon maintains an internal team, separate from their normal abuse team, to deal solely with reports of child sexual abuse on their networks.

Amazon, as a matter of policy, logs and tracks every single child abuse report it receives. This information, again as a matter of policy, is forwarded to Amazon contacts within the FBI, and to NCMEC.

Amazon maintains a database of child abusers, and hashes of child abuse images, which it makes available to law enforcement.

Amazon does not fuck around when it comes to child abuse. They have an ultra-strict policy, and they will strike down with great vengeance and furious anger anyone who uses their network for child sexual abuse. Hosting CP on Amazon is like calling down a targeted missile strike on your own location.

Quora, which is hosted on Amazon AWS…does not.

If you create a profile, or five profiles, or a hundred and fifty profiles, on Quora offering child sex abuse materials for sale, Quora will (well, I say will, Quora might) ban your account. It will not do anything beyond that.

The sellers of child abuse materials on Quora know that they need fear no repercussions beyond having their accounts banned…and maybe not even that. They operate brazenly and boldly on Quora, even posting profiles that literally say “CP for sale here, all ages available!”, because they know nothing will happen to them.

Why the pizza emoji? The slice of pizza emoji has become something of a universal signifier of those selling child abuse images. CP: Cheese Pizza. CP: Ch*ld P*rn. Get it?

How did Quora get here? What systemic failures led Quora to be the Internet’s hotspot for romance scammers and ch*ld p*rnographers?

Problem 11: Ayn Rand

Adam D’Angelo, Quora’s cofounder and absentee CEO, is the kind of Big-L Libertarian who mainlines Ayn Rand directly into his veins.

He’s one of those techbro Libertarians who believes, I mean really truly believes, that the solution to bad speech is more speech, as if more speech is a magic wand that somehow magically erases bad actors, scammers, spammers and ch*ld p*rnographers.

His fundamental worldview is one where acting against any speech, even “we have pictures of toddelers being raped and would you like to buy them?”, is anethema.

I believe this is why Quora has no built-in mechanisms to prevent any Tom , Dick, and Harry from creating an account called “Elon Musk” and putting up posts offering free Bitcoin if you just deposit money into an account to, you know, pay for “fees.” It’s why you can create an account called Keanu Reeves or Sandra Bullock and the system will just let you do it, because hey, we wouldn’t want to risk the real Keanu Reeves making an account and running into some kind of barrier, right? It’s why there are thousands of fake Keanu Reeves and thousands of fake Elon Musks and so on, and why Quora’s moderation, what’s left of it, is purely reactive and not proactive.

The problem is, we’ve seen over and over and over again that this approach does not work. It’s empirically not true. But it’s a religious idea among a certain kind of techbro; they want it to be true, so they treat it as Revealed Gospel, never to be questioned.

Any site that doesn’t take action against romance scammers becomes a chld prn site

Posted on by
4

Image: Melpomene on DepositPhotos, Karich on Depositphotos

I am, as many of you know, an active user on the question and answer site Quora, where I’ve been posting since June 2012.

I just sent a very long email to a contact I have at Quora admin, with a cc to Quora’s legal team and the founder/CEO’s personal email address.

I suppose I should have known it was coming. In January od 2023, almost exactly two years ago, I saw my first romance scam account on Quora. It used a photo of golfer and model Paige Spiranac to try to separate lonely men from their money. I reported the profile to Quora moderation 11 times, without any result, so finally, on January 22, 2023, I emailed Ms. Spiranac’s agent. I received a polite reply on January 23, and the bogus profile was banned on January 25, so I assume Ms. Spiranac’s team sent a DMCA takedown.

Too little, too late. The message came through loud and clear: “Quora has weak moderation that is tolerant of romance scammers.”

The floodgates opened. Today, Quora is the Internet’s Ground Zero for romance scammers; there are tens of tousands of fake profiles. I report every one I encounter. A few months back, Quora admins asked me to stop reporting them one at a time, so now I note the profile URLs and report them all in one go at the end of the day, typically 200-300 a day.

Universal law of social media:

Every site that doesn’t take action against romance scammers inevitably becomes a ch*ld p*rn site.

It happens in stages.

First, a romance scammer discovers a site. He (almost all romance scammers are “he”) sets up a profile. It doesn’t get banned. He tells his buddies, who also set up scam profiles. Word spreads.

Pretty soon, there’s a huge number of romance scammers, all fighting for the same pool of lonely, gullible marks.

They start “sniping:” one scammer will start commenting on other scammers’ profiles, trying to cut in on marks who respond to scam posts. They start angling for niche marks rather than shotgunning a general approach: some will pretend to be trans women, some will pretend to be heavy women to try to attract “chubby chaser” marks; some will pretend to be BDSM dommes, looking for kinky marks.

Then come the ones using stolen photos of underage children.

If those profiles remain without getting banned immediately, that sends a signal to the ch*ld p*rn community: This site is tolerant of exploitation of minors.

That’s when they move in: people offering CP/CSAM images for sale. They use all kinds of euphemisms: “cheese pizza” (CP), “hot yummy pizza images.”

At first, these are individual low-level sellers. If these accounts remain without being banned, then the organized CP rings move in.

That’s the background.

This morning, I set a lengthy email to my contact in Quora administration. I sent a cc to Quora’s legal team and to Quora’s CEO.

In the past few weeks, the number of profiles openly advertising CP for sale has skyrocketed. Yesterday, I found three organized CP rings operating scores of profiles on Quora.

I call these CP rings the “Evelyn ring,” the “Mornay Ivan” ring, and the “Purple Knott” ring, because of the profile names and the Telegram addresses they use. Out of respect to the victims whose images are being exploited, I’ve pixelated and blacked out the images of the victims; the CP profiles don’t.

The “Evelyn” ring:

The “Mornay Ivan” ring:

The “Purple Knott” ring, which seems to specialize in child bestiality:

Every day I report these. Every day Quora bans most (not all) the accounts I report. Every day there are more. Even though these rings create identical profiles with identical content.

Being stalked on Quora didn’t put me off the site. Getting death threats on Quora didn’t put me off the site. Being doxxed on Quora didn’t put me off the site. Having my content plagiarized didn’t put me off the site. This? This might put me off the site.

An Unexpected Journey

Posted on by
2

I’m sitting in my Talespinner’s living room, tending to her dogs, who believe with surety and absolute conviction there is something Outside that requires their immediate attention every fifteen minutes or so. The fact that they’ve been wrong about this three times in a row now does not in the slightest deter theri certainty that this time will be different. She (my Talespinnter) is at work, where she will be until ten o’clock tonight.

I flew in from Portland, after an entire day of travel. When I left, it was suny and 40 degrees; I connected in Huoston, where it was dark and in the 70s, and arrived late last night.

A week from today, she and I fly together to London before traveling on with much of the extended polycule to Wales.

This wasn’t the trip we had planned.

We’d planned for me to fly to Springfield in late November, when she’d be able to take some time off work, rent a cozy little cabin she found in a remote corner of Missouri, and isolate ourselves from the outside world to work on the third draft of our novel spin, a sprawling far-future, post-Collapse magical realism literary novel that is, in structure and narrative, the most ambitious, challenging, difficult writing project I’ve ever been part of.

Life got in the way.

We’re flying to London and then on to Wales because a person in our extended polycule, my girlfriend’s girlfriend, has received devastating medical news. Almost the entire polycule dropped what it was doing to go out there to support her.

I would not have been able to make the trip on such short notice without help from the rest of the extended network, and the unexpected generosity of complete strangers on the Internet, for which I am incredibly grateful.

The situation is unimaginably shitty, yet I am deeply, profoundly thankful to be part of such an amazing, supportive, generous, resilient, healthy, vibrant polycule.

If there is one lesson I could go back in time to give my younger self, it would be…well, it would be buy Bitcoin when it was still 25 cents. But if there were another, it would be this:

Franklin, there’s a word for what you are. That word doesn’t exist yet, but it’s “polyamorous,” and it means “loving many.” You aren’t alone in this, and you don’t need to settle. There are others like Find them. And if ever it should come to pass that a person you love tells you that you must break up with another person you love, or that they refuse to be around your other partners, never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever say yes. It is, in fact, possible to be part of an extended network of people who genuinely support each other, and don’t play those kinds of games.

Is It Graft or Is It Cruelty?

Posted on by
7

A few years back, I dropped a kettle of boiling water on my foot. The burns sent me to the ER, where I was given a shot of morphine, and then to the burn clinic, where I was prescribed oxycodone. (I have pictures of the burn. They’re not pretty.)

The morphine was awful. I could feel it coming on, like an unpleasant prickly hot surge that passed over my body in a wave. It was a bit like…it’s hard to describe, but imagine being cocooned in a malfunctioning electric blanket that keeps shocking you—a sense of flushed warmth accompanied by extremely unpleasant little zaps like touching a badly grounded electrical appliance with an intermittent short.

Then came the vomiting: vigorous, profuse, and enthusiastic, as if my body, not content with throwing up in a more pedestrian fashion, had decided to twist the spacetime continuum to expel food I hadn’t even eaten yet.

What didn’t happen was pain relief. At all. I was still in exactly as much agony as I was before the shot (and believe me, boiling water burns are awful, the only pain I’ve ever experienced worse than kidney stones).

The oxycodone? Same deal. Spectacularly, implausibly vigorous vomiting, fuckall pain relief.

Finally, in desperation, I tried a cannabis edible, and lo, it was as if a chorus of angels did sing, saying, “let this man’s pain be erased.” It also made me high, which was unpleasant, but every silver lining has a cloud around it, amirite?

Quite a bit of systematic experimentation later, I learned that the sweet spot for pain management for me is 2.5mg of THC and 2.5mg of CBD. That dosage is effective at pain management without leaving me incapable of functioning or unpleasantly high.

I’m probably unusual in that regard. I can definitely feel 1mg of THC. 2.5mg leaves me a little high, but it’s tolerable. 5mg of THC leaves me high AF and not in a good way. 10mg of THC, the one time I tried it, left me curled up on my side hallucinating vigorously.

I use it when ibuprofen doesn’t work, which isn’t very often. This:

is about a three-year supply for me; I cut the gummies into quarters and take a quarter if nothing else works.

I was able to try cannabis edibles thanks to a senator named Mitch McConnell, known to his friends as “that sour old turtle-faced motherfucker,” who in 2018 introduced legislation into an appropriations bill legalizing hemp.

Senator McConnell in an undated Senate photo

Fast forward to 2025, when a senator named Mitch McConnell, known to his friends as “that sour old turtle-faced motherfucker,” has introduced language into an appropriations bill that would ban hemp products across the board.

Now, we’ve all known for many years that Old Turtle-Face has no integrity, shame, scruples, or backbone. This is not new.

What’s new is that his motivations, usually as transparent as the film wrap over a styrofoam tray of ground meat at a discount supermarket, are completely opaque.

When he first said yay to hemp, before his about-face flip-flop, he raved on and on about how it would help Kentucky farmers…farmers he’s now shot, stabbed, and tossed under a bus.

My take on that is someone with a financial interest in cannabis farming offered him a lot of money, then somehow the deal soured.

My Talespinner disagrees. She deals with chronic pain and, like me, has found cannabis a godsend for pain management…only to have it yanked away, leaving few options between, you know, addictive opioids and over-the-counter pain relievers. Her take: it’s intentional, calculated cruelty. Turtleface gets off on it.

And the thing is, either of those two explanations—political crony corruption or deliberate, calculated cruelty—fits. They’re both within Senator Turtledick’s wheelhouse. They both fit his pattern of observed behavior; the man has never met corruption he doesn’t embrace or pointless sadism he doesn’t indulge. He’s basically a walking encyclopedia of the worst impulses of humanity, a case study in unscrupulous, dishonorable barbarism.

So what say you? Is it merely greed, or is he letting slip is inner spite?

I am tired of that man

Posted on by
8

My metamour, my girlfriend’s girlfriend, has received some absolutely devastating medical news.

The entire polycule has done an absolutely amazing job of stepping up to support her. In two weeks, I leave for Springfield, where I will join my Talespinner to fly out to London and from there travel to Wales to be with her. The extended polycule did an amazing job of pulling this together in a very short time, and supporting each other to make it happen. My metamours and meta-metamours who were able to even helped the rest of us financially so that we could make arrangements to fly out last minute.

Even complete strangers helped. I would not have been able to go without the kindness of people on social media who offered financial support, completely unasked and unexpected. I am overwhelmed grateful beyond measure for the kindness of people I don’t even know who contributed out of the blue to make this happen.

Thanks to the government shutdown, the FAA is reducing flights at many airports, including PDX. It’s not clear yet whether or not my flight will be one of the ones cut, or what will happen if it is.

United Airlines has offered no-questions-asked refunds on flights ahead of the FAA cuts in air travel…but because international travel isn’t affected by the mandated cuts, they’re only offering me a refund on my domestic flight. I have tickets from Portland to Springfield, then Springfield to London and back, then Springfield to Portland, and right now it’s completely up in the air when (or even if) I will be able to get to Springfield.

I am so goddamn tired of this.

I’m tired of him.

I’m tired of the pettiness. I’m tired of the meanness. I’m tired of the grift, the selfishness, the pointless purposeless malice. I’m tired of his followers, so eager to hurt themselves as long as the people they hate are hurt more.

I’m tired of trying to have empathy for people who are sobbing that they’re losing their jobs or ther farms because he isn’t hurting the people they think he should be hurting. They voted for the leopard and now they’re shocked their faces are being eaten, too.

The stupidity, the venality, the cruelty, the mendacity, the sadistic malignity, I am just so absolutely sick of all of it.

One day, this will end.

Of Medical Misadventure and Waffle House

Posted on by
Reply

Waffle House is a strange place at 2AM on a Saturday.

My Talespinner came home from work yesterday in a bad state…bad enough to bundle her off to urgent care, where we met The Worst Triage Nurse in the World, a statement I feel quite confident in making even without, you know, having met every triage nurse in the world. He failed to recognize symptoms of anaphylaxis when it was right in front of him…

…so we spent over an hour in the waiting room and another half-hour in an actual room before a nurse came in, took one look at her, said “ER, right now,” and had her admitted.

The ER reached the same conclusion, shot her full of antihistamines and steroids, and a surprisingly short while later she was right as rain.
Funny how correct diagnosis works.
I will say the whole thing was a wonderful example of the best things about polyamory. Her other boyfriend came up to meet us in hospital and helped her roomie and I care for her.

Once she was discharged, we landed at Waffle House. Waffle House is, as I may have mentioned, a strange place at 2AM on a Saturday. The two burly guys in the corner wolfing down immense plates of hash browns were clearly werewolves, and I think our server was a fey changeling or something.

Of course, because she is who she is, my Talespinner came up with a new story idea. She didn’t earn that name from nothing!

Today in American Anti-Intellectualism

Posted on by
6

Almost exactly two years ago, when I was in Florida helping care for my mom who had terminal cancer, I tweeted a photo of myself wearing a Stand Up for Science T-shirt. Cape Coral, Florida is antivax central, ground zero of the know-nothing Ron Desantist anti-intellectual craze, so I made a point of wearing that shirt around town.

Three days ago, that two-year-old tweet went viral, which was weird. Retweeted and commented on all over the place. So, curious, I took a look, and apparently it got picked up by the antivax/moon landing deniar/flat earth crowd. Here’s but one of the threads of retweets and comments, posted by a person who’s a moon landing denier, antivaxxer, and Reptilian conspiracy nutter:

The US has a long history of weird anti-intellectualism, going all the way back to the vicious streak of religious Puritanism that runs through American society. We’re so used to it we don’t even see it, but my European friends who visit are always a little shocked by how deep know-nothing, Fundamentalist Protestantism runs in US culture.

Evangelical religion is inherently incompatible with science. A lot, a lot of Americans truly, sincerely believe that the world is 6,000 years old, all the animals were made exactly as they are now, and people and dinosaurs once lived side by side. This is not in the least bit unusual in US society.

This has led to an ongoing, generations-long war against science education in the United States. The Scopes monkey trials are just the tip of the iceberg.

In the last 40 years, that war on education has been joined by American populist political conservatives, who see value in an uneducated population. It used to be that American conservatives, all the way up through Ronald Reagan, were 100% behind cold-eyed, factual science education; this fit with their idea that the US should lead the world in science and technology, because you can’t do that without an educated population.

It took a liberal in the form of JFK to promise to get us to the moon, but the engineers and rocket scientists who made it happen were overwhelmingly conservatives. Not in the current “populist know-nothing party” sense of conservatives, but old-school, pre-Reagan conservatives.

Nowadays, what passes for a “conservative party” in the US is isolationist populists. They want to withdraw from the world stage, so American technical and scientific leadership doesn’t matter to them. They openly embrace the most extreme Evangelical Christians, the Prosperity Gospel, Christian Dominionist movement that seeks to create a theocracy to replace the US government. Their goals are aligned: Education has got to go.

That’s created a huge backlash against science education. Educated people are “elitist.” Universities are “liberal indoctrination centers.”

This isn’t new, of course. What’s new is the alliance between political conservatives and the Evangelical right on opposition to science and knowledge, an unholy union where each of the two sides sincerely believes it is using the other for opportunistic gain.

It exists at least in part because we live in a time of prosperity and unprecedented safety. Very few people alive today remember a time when children weren’t expected to live to be adults, even though that was a frighteningly short time ago.

One of the people in my polycule, who wishes to remain nameless, rather brilliantly calls conspiracy thinking “idiot mantras for dopamine mining” and puts it like this:

It’s literally: Step 1: Confusion about actual science Step 2: read/hear confident idiot talk about how everyone is wrong except you, because you are listening to him so you must be smart Step 3: think “I don’t want to believe I’m stupid so I’ll believe stupid things to feel smart” Step 4: I are smart! I’ll just repeat the same things over and over like some sort of argument cheat code, and anyone who disagrees must be stupid, so I will ignore them”

This enshrinement of the idiocracy, this reflexive anti-intellectualism that has its roots deep in the fertile soil of the American ideals of exceptionalism and Rugged Individualism™, is fundamentally at odds with a post-industrial society in an interconnected economy.

As we turn away from learning and knowledge, craving the certainty of the Age of Superstition, we cede our role in the world. But not to worry, someone else will take over. I’m guessing China.

Adventures in Drug Addiction…and not even the fun kind.

Posted on by
11

Ever since I was in high school, I’ve suffered severe allergies, a trait I inherited from my dad. Pollen, ragweed, animals, dust mites, you name it, I’m addicted to it. For most of my life, I’ve had a persistent low-grade cough from about April to about October.

And nothing I’ve ever tried has worked, except Benadryl, which knocks me out for 14 hours. Not Allegra, not Claritin, not fexofenadine, nothing.

In 2018, I discovered Xyzal (levocetirizine), a once a day antihistamine that, by some miracle, actually worked. For seven glorious years, I’ve been mostly allergy-free, mostly.

Fast forward to last month, when out of the blue I started getting hives on my arms and sides out of nowhere. Careful, systematic experimentation revealed the culprit to be levocetirizine, which still works but makes me break out.

So I quit taking it.

Big, big mistake.

It turns out levocetirizine is physically addictive. And I’ve taken it every single day for seven years.

It also turns out that you’re not supposed to discontinue long-term use abruptly. Apparently once daily for seven years qualifies as “long-term use.”

The withdrawal from levocetirizine is absolutely brutal—anxiety, insomnia, headaches, difficulty breathing, nausea, fatigue, irritability, shortness of breath…I got the whole package, including some of the withdrawal effects WebMD calls “uncommon.”

I’ve been off it for a month now. According to WebMD, I have about 2-4 weeks of withdrawal left.

But hey, at least I’m also having allergy attacks again.

Shoot me now.

Courage is Grace Under Pressure

Posted on by
5

Image: prill

I am in London as I write this, sitting in a lover’s flat overlooking the London city skyline. I was here when I learned the news of the 2024 Presidential election—that hate won over love, bigotry over compassion, spite over benevolence.

I understand the sick despair many of us feel in the pit of our stomach right now. Dark times hover on the horizon. I don’t believe the people who voted so resoundingly against the better angels of our nature realize yet what they’ve done. Some of them likely never will, and for those who do, it will be too late.

I’m not here to analyze what happened, or rail against the stubborn streak of vicious, ugly racist misogyny that has long been part of the American spirit. Others are already doing that, some of them quite eloquently, and I do believe there’s value in understanding what happened, but that is not the most important thing right now.

It’s vital to understand going forward, though I think the answer is grubber, more sordid, and more banal than we might otherwise hope: there has always been this vicious streak of mean-spirited, ugly anti-intellectualism embedded deep in the American national character, that has been with us from the start. It has never changed, and it likely never will in our lifetimes. We are simultaneously the land of can-do optimism and sleazy, seedy execration. These are the two faces of the American civic character, and this week, the ignorance won.

But I want to remind everyone reading this that there is hope. Like the dawning of the sun after a night of terror, this too shall pass.

Image: Jessica Ruscello and mixformdesign

I do not wish to trivialize what is to come. Many people will suffer. My trans and nonbinary friends are terrified right now. Two nights ago, a great many decent Americans discovered just how badly their country hates them, just how deep the ugly river of xenophobia flows through the American psyche.

There will be suffering. There will be blood. There will be ugliness, and violence, and hopelessness, and despair. I do not want to minimize any of the grotesqueries we all see on the horizon.

I will, instead, invite us all to take a deep breath, and remember that the course of history is neither straight nor smooth, but it does tend, in the long term, toward peace and justice.

We have been here before. We have, as a nation, been worse before. We were built on the foundation of slavery and we have never truly stepped away from it. Yet we have made progress, and we will again. It might not seem like it now, but this is a setback, not the end of all things.

I would especially like to remind those of us who feel most betrayed by our fellow citizens, those who voted against their own interests purely out of spite and desire to hurt, not to do the oppressor’s work for him.

I still remember the first time this country elevated this vicious, narcissistic, racist, sexist, conman, this tumor on the American psyche, to the highest office the first time. I remember how the shockwaves echoed through my own personal life, how a person I once loved became a bitter, angry, sullen echo of herself, how she told me directly that she was abrasive and prickly to me simply because, in her words, she felt overwhelmed with hopelessness and despair, and I was the only safe place for her to dump that poisonous emotional sewage.

Image: grandfailure

I learned only a few days ago from a person in my life I love dearly that there’s a name for this. It’s called “lateral violence.” Those who feel oppressed, who feel ground down by an enemy far too dangerous and powerful to fight, release their anger and fear and frustration on one another, tearing into each other with a viciousness that it is not safe to direct outward.

Many of us will do that over the coming year. I would like to invite us all not to do the oppressors’ work for them, not to become a participant in our own subjugation.

This has always been a peculiar and pernicious weakness of those of us on the progressive side, this tendency to turn on our own. Tim Minchin expressed this beautifully:

It cannot, it cannot be okay if the intention of progressives—which I assume it is—is progress forward into a future of more empathy and understanding for more people, it cannot be that the primary mechanism by which we’re going to make that progress is the suppression of empathy and understanding for anyone who doesn’t align with our beliefs. It cannot be that unmitigated expression of furious outrage will somehow alchemize into a future of peace and love.

I understand the impulse toward despair and the anger that it brings. I understand that anger, lacking a safe outlet, is all too easily directed at those around us who are like us, those we think have failed the cause, have not done enough to fight oppression (or perhaps have not fought it in the “right” way).

I understand, too, where this leads.

We cannot do this. We must not do this. The story is not over. The storm will end. We must not, in our rage and hopelessness, turn on one another.

Now, more than ever, if we are to survive what is to come, we must, we absolutely must, support each other. That is the way we get through this. Not by adopting the tools and mindset of our enemy, not by doing our enemy’s work for him, not by tearing each other down because we don’t know where else to direct our feelings, but by holding each other, supporting each other, loving each other. Love does not triumph over hate by becoming hate.

The the arc of the moral universe is long, as MLK Jr said, but it bends toward justice.. This path is never as straight nor as swift as we would like, and sometimes for every three steps forward there is one backward.

It’s okay to feel rage, despair, all those other things. I feel them too. We have a choice: we can use them to lift each other up or tear each other down.

I don’t believe in New Years resolutions. But I have, today, this moment, made a resolution for the next four years.

My resolution is that I will do everything in my power to act with greater kindness, greater compassion, greater benevolence and empathy and grace. I will not allow those who despise these things to destroy them in me. I will not do the oppressor’s work for him. I will not be complicit in my own eradication.

JRR Tolkien believed—indeed, this is one of the central moral lessons of his works—that good triumphs over evil not because good is stronger than evil, but because good works with itself while evil works against itself. We do not defeat bullies by becoming bullies ourselves. That, I think, is our blueprint forward.

I’ve posted this image on my blog before. It is vital to remember it now.

With every job when it’s complete, there is a sense of bitter-sweet

Posted on by
2

After almost three years of effort, I finally had my last dental appointment yesterday. In honor of the journey, my dentist wore bunny ears during that last session.

It started with a failed crown. That in itself shouldn’t have turned into a three-year nightmare, but gather ’round, Gentle Readers, for a harrowing tale to send chills down the spines of the most manly of men.

The crown was old; I got it in 1998 or 1999. Apparently these things don’t last forever (who knew?); they’re usually rated for fifteen years and this one lasted 25, so yay for that, I guess?

Anyway, I took the broken crown to my dentist, who looked at it, peered into my mouth, probed around a bit, said “hmm” a lot, then said something you never want to hear from a healthcare professional:

“We don’t deal with this kind of situation here. You’ll need to go somewhere else.”

Now, we’re talking about what ought to be, in the scheme of things, a rather simple and straightforward procedure (ha ha ha as if, just you wait), not the sort of medical condition where a doctor gets to name a new disease, so I found this…peculiar. But, referral in hand, I made an appointment with a new dentist.

They too looked at the broken crown, poked around for a bit, said “hmm” a lot, took a whole bunch of X-rays, said “hmm” some more, took a different kind of X-ray, said “hmm,” and then my dentist called another dentist over, who looked at all the X-rays, said “hmm,” then said “I’m going to call someone else to have a look at this.”

That is when I knew, Gentle Reader, that Something Was Up.

The new guy showed up, looked at the X-rays, said “hmm” several times, and then said “okay, so, Mr. Veaux, you see…”

The problem was not the crown that failed, but the one next to it. I’d had a root canal in…goodness. Um, 1996, maybe? Somewhere thereabouts.

In this world, there are people who take pride in their work, people for whom it’s not just the money but the satisfaction of a job well done. The guy who did that root canal…wasn’t that sort of person.

The X-ray showed a small void, a gap between the crown on that tooth and the tooth itself.

It also showed a large piece of a broken tool lodged inside the tooth.

And it showed that the dentist had, and as I type these words I did not know this was possible, missed one of the tooth roots completely, which had, of course, become infected.

They had a meeting, in which they discussed whether they wanted to re-do the root canal by taking off the existing crown, drilling through the existing crown, or (and yes, this actually came up as a possibility) drilling through the bottom of my jaw into the tooth, which is apparently a procedure that, God help them, some people actually undergo.

Then my mom was diagnosed with cancer, so both my sister and I started flying back and forth between home and Florida to help my dad care for her.Which pretty much scuttled most of my ability to plan multiple dental visits.

My mom died after a thirteen-month battle, the last few months of which were just awful beyond belief.

When I returned once more unto the breach of this dental misadventure, I had The Talk™ with my dentist, and with the dentist called in to re-do the root canal. The Talk™ looks like this:

Just so you know, I am highly resistant to local anesthetics. It’s a genetic trait, I inherited it from my mom. It is much harder than you think to get me numb, and it takes a long time, and it wears off quickly. So, be warned.

I always tell them. They never listen at first. “Oh, don’t worry, I can get you numb,” each new dentist says, “it won’t be a problem.”

Narrator: “It was a problem.”

The guy they called in to handle the root canal took nearly an hour, and seven ampules of lidocaine(!!), before he declared himself ready.

He went in through the existing crown, which was something of an ordeal involving several fascinating smells, including one I could almost swear smelled like smoke, and rather a lot more “hmm” and “that’s interesting” and “I wonder if…” than I am, generally speaking, entirely comfortable with from someone who is placing medical instruments in any part of my body.

Apparently, from what I gather, the tooth had an extra root, which I didn’t even know was a thing that could happen, and that explains why the previous guy back in the 90s missed it but doesn’t explain why he left a broken bit of tool inside the root canal (they didn’t give me a copy of the X-ray, more’s the pity, because it’s freaky and I’d love to horrify you, Gentle Reader, with it).

After rather a lot of work, he pronounced himself satisfied, and I was back on track, only this time with replacing two crowns rather than one.

I be-bopped off to Springfield to spend time with my Talespinner, then returned to tilt once more at the windmill, when my dentist took a whole new set of X-rays on account of, you know, I’d been away for thirteen months helping care for my mom, and decided that a third crown, also from the mid 90s or somewhere thereabout, was separating from the tooth and thus was well past its use-by date.

I will spare you the details of the last seven months, even though Fate did not spare me, because unlike Fate I have a conscience. Suffice to say that seven months, a detached temporary crown, and three thousand dollar in out-of-pocket expenses later, I have been given a clean bill of health, and my dentist sent me off from yesterday’s appointment with a celebratory pair of ears of his own.

Which I, and the entire rest of the office, found charming.

Now the days spread before me, my calendar has no dental appointments on it, and I breathe in and say to myself, “is this what normal feels like?”