Don't get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because wood is fiddly as fuck.
OR
DO get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because it will burn that shit right out of you If you don't die from an aneurysm first. It'll teach you to build all sorts of wiggle room into everything in life, not just furniture.
People will think what you made was amazing, that it took so much skill.
Nope.
Only you know how you put everything together loosely, then tightened screws incrementally while adjusting clamps and smacking it with a rubber mallet until it looked right. There are pilot holes they can't see that don't go anywhere. You definitely missed gluing something important. You might have weighted a piece with epoxy and cat litter because you forgot to buy weights, it was 3 am, and you were unintentionally high as balls on stain fumes, but you really wanted to finish in time to surprise your partner for their birthday.
They don't know, they'll never know, and they don't need to know.
Don't forget the thousands of dollars in tools you'll be compelled to buy and never being able to throw out even the small piece of wood because "you might need it someday".
Tell me about it, and there's always something better than what you have. How to be smart about buying tools deserves its own entire comment chain.
I didn't know about these until recently, but I now recommend folks check out local tool libraries to get started and see what they want or need for low to no cost.
We have a one car garage full of maintenance and fabrication tools I've acquired over my life. They've paid for themselves multiple times over in even just the last decade, but the cost and space requirements are prohibitive for a lot of folks. It's one of those "having money saves money" situations, but tool libraries can help a lot.
My foray into woodworking began and ended with figuring "sheesh, custom picture frames are so expensive, how hard could it be?!"...
By the end of that experience, nothing felt real anymore. Every foolishly pure mathematical concept, every platonic ideal - shameful indulgences of the young and weak. Our grand edifices of knowledge, little more than piles of tattered rags with which we clothe our nakedness, arrogant and hubristic in our vulgar conceits.
My partner complimented my new shelf recently. Then she looked closer and realised it was a few boards stacked up on the cheapest engineering bricks I could find but rotated so the holes are not visible.
Only got a folding hand saw which I suspect isn't the best for making straight cuts, I had considered cutting up a railway sleeper for blocks instead of the bricks. Bricks worked out cheaper. Wooden blocks could look nice though.
Just cut pieces of wood big enough to cover the front of the bricks, and glue them on. Wood on the front, and brick on the side, will look like a cool design choice.
After having worked with wood and son of a cabinet maker, I crave the strength and certainly of steel. I got into welding in a big way.some aluminium, but mostly steel. It's such a wonderful material. Cut it, weld it, grind it, bam, new and bigger steel. You can't make a piece of wood bigger.
Especially if you want to make "good" food. I'm not saying there isn't good food that is healthy for you. But if you want to make things taste like they do in a high end restaurant, it's probably going to require a shitload of butter/ghee and salt. And then probably cream. And also highly fatty meats.
I have a pretty addictive personality and I thank the stars that I've never enjoyed coke on the handful of occasions I've tried it. It just made me feel overly talkative to the point of being annoying.
I have done a fair share of coke and while it was nice to be able to party for two days straight I never really felt addicted. But that's probably just me cause downers on the other hand my god that's shits addictive.
A ex heroin addict once told me that when I talked about the downers I was using that I sounded like an heroin addict and that I shouldn't ever try heroin. (Which I guess is great advice in general but the way she said it still stays with me)
Understandable, my brains already unfocussed jumping around, coke would just make me say all that shit out loud, downers would calm me down and make me feel normal
I'm basically coked out by default, it would simply keep me from blacking out or bring me out of one when I used to use it. Otherwise no change, it's the same with alcohol, it takes a lot to actually bring on a change, most people usually think I'm still sober or barely drunk blacked out apparently. Never really felt addicted to either, weed on the other hand, apparently not addictive, but it forsure ruins my mood when I try to quit. (Haven't drank in over 6 months, and had a fat gap before that, don't think of it, haven't used coke for over 2 years probably, don't think of it either, weed + nicotine I still use daily) I'm not trying to quit them either, just not around fun ppl or things to do since moving back home after college, so I just never think to do it.
I remember in college, when someone would get into MTG, we'd jokingly say coke's cheaper.
Now, when someone I know gets into 40k, I much less jokingly say "MTG's cheaper"
Then again, if you're just playing for fun against friends, a $200 3d printer is cheaper than any army I've seen. Still costs more than a $45 booster draft, but at least the printer's a one-time cost
I only have an FDM printer xD You can still do a lot with it, though, especially if you're willing to get a heat gun involved. Though after printing out the character in my profile pic, I did realize there's a lot of small detail that gets lost with FDM.
Alas, though, small animals, a cat, and poor ventilation make resin printing a bad idea for me
Honestly, I don't find it a ton of fun. I use mine so occasionally, you kind of forget how little post processing you do on an FDM print for the most part. Though I definitely see the advantage for minis especially if you're going to paint it afterwards.
To piggy back on this, don't chase the fucking meta. By the time you get your Exaction Squad and paint it, GW will balance it into being a total waste of your time/money/points.
Come give Warmachine a shot, army sizes are usually smaller and the rules are less "my rule book was published more recently, that means I win" (Plus the models are slightly cheaper).
Yeah, there really hasn’t been a good alternative for fabric. Lots of people were quick to jump on the “lol join the 21st century and just buy it online” side of the argument, but buying fabric is an extremely tactile experience. You need to feel it to know that it will have the correct texture, weight, see it will hang, which direction(s) it will stretch, how much it will stretch, how easy is is to stretch, etc for what you’re trying to make, because all of those qualities will heavily impact the end product. Those things are difficult to quantify, and nearly impossible to judge purely from photos on an online listing. Two fabrics that look identical online can have vastly different weights, stretch, textures, etc…
It's miserable. It was such a good store, Michael's doesn't compare for fabric yet. Hoping they get as much fabric as they've been sending me emails, might get a lot then lol
I did astronomy like 25 years ago, yes a good telescope is kind of $$$, eyepieces, etc. I wanted to do some astro-photo but back in the days it was top$. But anyway the biggest problem, being in eastern Canada, is that you can only use it at night (hé), and in winter it is so freaking cold it's almost unusable, so you only have summer where night starts at like 10PM... When you have a life, job, house, partner, house, kids, name it, you don't have time or energy for this.
So I went to RC cars, cheaper!!! can be used during the day, even for 10 minutes, not requiring a setup, just take the remote and the car, make sure the battery is charged, that's it. Buy one for the kid too, bash them, take a brand like Traxxas and you can find cheap parts everywhere for 20 years.
Tell me you're a front end programmer, without telling me you're a front end programmer.
I had to do FE for a freelance work, I learned Angular built the thing and delivered, a few year later I wanted to do some other stuff went to check Angular documentation and it had changed completely, plus no one else was using it because everyone had migrated to React.
Yea, its a big reason why I try to avoid FE like the plauge! As soon as you learn what everyone is using, everyone is using something else, or its going through a major rework that changes everything.
I kinda wish I considered my social anxiety and picked a better solitairy instrument than drums. They're super fun to play, but I was only ever in one band and I'm too anxious to play with strangers right now. I just jam by myself, but I suspect I'd have an easier time actually writing music if I had more experience with melody. I tried picking up guitar and violin later, but so far I haven't had the energy to really devote the time needed to learn another instrument.
Have you thought about an "MPC" type instrument like a Native Instruments Maschine? I feel like that might be a nice evolution for you as it would allow you to transition a love for percussion into a songwriting tool that is a blast to jam out with and make patterns with.
I mean, I really like nice finger drumming pads, but you could also just use a more traditional midi drum kit to record loops the point is that you can have a blast with an MPC type tool all by yourself with headphones on and you can then choose to share that or not, it is perfect as a solo instrument.
Bonus points you could record loops of yourself playing your actual drums and slice up the audio samples in an MPC, that would be super cool.
I also think as a drummer having an MPC might be really nice to throw loops of certain sections of songs into that you wanted to practice so that you could easily switch between them and keeping looping that section to practice as long as needed.
If you have a computer you can get a used/older NI Maschine for fairly cheap just make sure you get a software key. The pads feel really nice on those, but it is all down to preference.
A lot of people like the Ableton Push series of controllers but for me the pure playing feel of the Maschine is hard to beat and the ability to build loops into songs without looking at your computer screen while still having access to all the benefits of being connected to a computer (easy file access of samples for example) is really nice.
Go to Guitar Center or something and try out one, they are a blast I promise! They are inherently percussive instruments and I think having experience as a drummer is a great platform to enter into learning MPC type instruments from.
So I picked up a maschine+ because the standalone was important to me, and I'm absolutely loving it so far. Thanks again for the suggestion, this thing's awesome.
Guitar is difficult to learn, especially if you don't know anything about music theory.
You might want to start with a basic digital piano, and learn basic keyboard skills, and music theory at the same time. As a drummer, you have good hand independence, and will probably pick up piano pretty quickly.
Music theory is a supremely elegant system, and you may find it soothing for your anxiety.
This is really intensely packed information, but EVERYTHING you need to know about music theory is on there, especially the basic stuff. You'll find lots of great explanations on YouTube. It's a lot like mathematics, one small thing leads to another, and it all develops into an elegant complex system built on logic at every step. Most of it becomes pretty intuitive once you figure out the basics.
When you get a keyboard, make sure to get one with weighted keys, so it feels like a real piano. I got a really nice Donner on sale, and it's lasted for years.
And of course practice every day. Try to get 20-30 minutes a day, either when you first get up, or before you go to bed, or preferably both. Make it a habit, and you'll get better quickly. Keep it up and you'll get fluid at reading music, and then it gets fun. You can be there in a year. You can take up the guitar next year.
And don't worry about playing with someone else, just learn to play keyboard and you can start making your own recordings on your computer, and you only have to play with yourself. That's what I do, along with guitar and bass. I wish I played drums, I have to use pads and program drum grooves.
Yeah, the guitar is really hard, you have to really want to play. There's a long learning curve (endless, really), and it's not very intuitive, ESPECIALLY when it comes to theory. That's why guitarists have a much different approach to theory than other musicians.
Piano on the other hand, makes theory seem ridiculously easy, once you've mastered the notes on the staff.
I'm a guitarist, primarily, but I learned music theory getting a degree in music history about a million years ago, so I got the educational grounding BEFORE I really got into the guitar. It made it a LOT easier. I can't imagine learning proper theory on guitar. I run through chord progressions on the guitar just fine, but so much of early theory is harmonic note leading, and that can only be taught, and learned, properly on a keyboard.
Once you're decent on the keyboard, not a master or anything, but you know basic theory and can play some easy stuff, you can try to learn guitar, and transfer your knowledge over there. It should shorten the learning curve a bit, or at least make it less frustrating.
You're fingertips are still going to scream either way.
drummer here as well! I'm very glad to play the drums and not guitar or anything else. Okay, you're the loudest one, but you also have your own safe space. I really see my drums as a wall between me and the rest of the stage/the band. It's a comfort zone, a protection. Let the drums do the talking and hide behind your kit (figure of speech, not literally as that would be hard to play)
I definitely had similar issues with bass, it would have made more sense for me to start with guitar. Though either way, I do my best work when I'm programming synths. And I never really got good enough at bass to play the kinds of lines that made me pick up bass in the first place, anyway ...
I started with guitar, but quickly grew bored with it because I'd rather play bass. Never really seriously played any instrument after that, though I have two guitars and three accordions laying around, along with another guitar, a ukelele and two keyboards from my kids. I guess I'm more of a collector.
Buying more expensive and better gear will not make you better at it. I not even going to tell you what the hobby is because this applies to so many of them. If you can do your hobby with the gear you have and you think "oh man I wish I had that, I could do awesome things" - it's only worth it if you spend a whole lot of time on your hobby. If you're like me and you only spend a couple hours a week or month on your hobby, it's usually not worth it. Unless it's something that let's you do stuff faster. Because then you can do more in the few hours you have. I'm sure there are other exceptions to the rule, but in general, before you buy some shit, think to yourself "Do I really need this? Or do I just want it?"
I'm into playing guitar, bass and electronic music production, and IMO while there is definitely a "collecting instead of practicing/writing" issue to look out for, the right gear makes a pretty big difference. e.g. you do need a guitar with a good neck (not warped, good frets), you do need a guitar that's not too heavy for you, you do need software (or hardware, if that's your thing) with a workflow that works for you.
Currently struggling with the software part. Could well be that I'm just in a hole in general, but I was definitely more productive when I was making Game Boy chiptune with a simple tracker than I am with standard DAWs. At the same time, I'm very reluctant to enter into the rabbit hole of groove boxes, hardware sequencers etc.
Oh for sure, completely agree with all of that, but there is a point of diminishing returns. Like you definitely need functional equipment. And it's nice to have nicer equipment. But buying yet another guitar doesn't make you better at the guitar, and you can probably get better by practicing more often with what you have.
Don't get me started on music software. I could spend $10,000 a week on plugins that I would never use because they all look so awesome.
Sequencing on something like LSDJ is great because you are locked into this tiny little ecosystem and you have to get creative.
Sequencing on something like LSDJ is great because you are locked into this tiny little ecosystem and you have to get creative.
This exactly. When I use a standard DAW, I spend SO much time searching for (or making) samples, synth patches, tweaking effects to usually little effect, while the constraints of LSDj force me to have a relatively consistent sound from the get-go and into actually making music. Unfortunately, it's hard to translate that into something that isn't chiptune or some other genre that I don't particularly care for right now like rock.
Not sure what hobby this is, but honestly it goes for almost every one of my hobbies. Especially photography. I could probably just get good with my Canon EOS 40D for digital and my Canon EOS 300 for analog photography. But collecting new gear is so satisfying. There's always something new to improve. "If only I had X, then I could really do Y well". Though I at least feel like I've somewhat contained myself. I haven't bought any new camera or lens that was more than like 500 bucks, and honestly with what I have now I don't really feel the need to upgrade.
This does NOT go for watercolor painting! While you certainly dont need a lot of colors and brushes. The quality of both is paramount for progress and a decent outcome! Paper is even worse. You need a lot and of the expensive stuff. Acrylic paintig is not as bad but still...
The benefits of keeping old devices. Before we moved several years ago, I had several computers/laptops, storage devices and some other miscellaneous devices that I'd be able to use and actually benefit from if I had kept them.
I have games that I can't get working on either Linux or newer versions of Windows.
Hard drives from old computers and laptops can be relatively cheaply converted into external hard drives and, while they wont be fast and possibly not reliable if used too much, they offer decent storage for the price.
I often use smaller storage devices (like SD cards and MP3 players) for transferring files from one computer to another and I also like to use them as temporary storage to preserve my hard drives when I don't need fast storage.
Another thing I wish I had known about, was just how quickly emulation would get good for older games. I've wasted so much money from buying older/retro consoles because I thought that emulation would stay as just a niche interest. Nowadays, while some games and systems are still iffy, you can emulate a wide variety of consoles and a lot of emulators even work well on some older and low end devices.
Old SD cards are so convenient. Pair them with a small USB card reader and you can carry a bunch of temporary storage in your pocket without buying anything extra.
Photosensitive polymer resin is nasty stuff, and stereolithography 3D printing requires a lot more safety considerations than FDM printing does! No regrets though, it’s still a lot of fun
My boss pushed us to research and acquire a resin printer a couple years ago. My coworker pushed the high-budget Form Labs direction due to his poor experience with resin printing in college. I had zero experience with resin (mostly only used Prusa FDM at that time) and pushed toward the relatively low budget Anycubic Photon direction, from the standpoint of "this is really not what we need to be doing with our budget, and this doesn't make sense for our use case, so I'll try to waste less money."
Now that my coworker's been gone for over a year, my boss thinks no one uses it because we don't know how. I know how, but FDM is just so much more approachable. I can swap filaments, click print, and walk away in about two minutes and trust that I'll come back to a usable part.
Changing out resin is its own special hell, and good luck if you have a print fail and have to clean off the bottom of the tray. I didn't get to a point of trusting prints to finish. Even when it does finish, you still have to wash and cure, and every part I ever made in resin seemed to be dimensionally unstable. Even the sample parts a Form Labs rep sent us were badly warped in shipping. The Photon hasn't been used in well over a year. CEO wants us to get rid of it, and I agree. Boss isn't letting go.
Meanwhile we just got two P2S printers that are cranking out parts like a champ. I would rather take a leisurely stroll across Eastern Ukraine than print with resin ever again.
Companion planting, friend! You can grow garlic and basil in the same pot. They all three work well together. Also, if it’s indeterminate, trim that thing. It doesn’t have to keep growing to produce.
Learn to compost, too. Take care of your soil and it will take care of your plants.
The mostly ortholinear grid relationship between frets and strings mean that you can think a lot about "shapes", or positions of notes relative to other notes. Unless open strings are involved, sliding any shape up and down the next gives you the same quality of chord or scale just shifted up and down in pitch/key. (Not all instruments have such an intuitive layout!)
You don't need to memorize the note names (C, C#, D, Eb, etc.) of every fret on the fretboard! It's essential to learn the names of the open strings first, so that you can tune your guitar using a tuner. But did you know that the notes at the 12th fret (often marked with double dot inlays) are the exact same notes 1 octave higher? This means that everything above the 12th fret is an exact copy of everything on the lower half of the fretboard (cutting the task of memorization in HALF)! Similarly, because the lowest and highest string are both tuned to "E" in standard tuning, they have the same notes all the way up and down the neck (that's another 7.5% of the task eliminated). Finally, I recommend starting to memorize the note names strategically, starting with only the inlay/dot frets (3, 5, 7, and 9) on the 2 fattest/lowest strings (E and A string). Once you've memorized these key "landmarks" on the lowest/fattest strings, you can use logic to deduce the other notes pretty quickly! (What's the note between A and B? Bb! Between C and D? C#)
Finally, learning 2 note intervals will eventually be your best friend. Not only can you use octaves to make deducing note names easier while memorizing the fretboard, but you can also play octaves to enhance all kinds of music from punk to jazz. A perfect 5 interval is the heart of the "power chord". And knowing intervals will help you do everything from reading sheet music to writing interesting guitar parts in all genres.
The huge number of popular rock music that you hear can be played with 2 or 3 note "power chords" alone. This is important because it means that you can become proficient enough to play rhythm guitar parts with a band in a matter of weeks of solid practice! All you have to do is memorize the note landmarks on the lower strings, be able to build a power chord on the appropriate note, and strum it in time with the music! Whether it's guitar or bass, you don't need to be an expert to start playing or writing songs.
When you eventually learn your first scale, try to learn it in 2 positions on the neck. For example, if you learn E-minor pentatonic, learn it starting from the 6th string at the 0 fret (which is the same as the 12th fret, remember!) AND learn it starting from the 5th string at the 7th fret. This may seem harder at first, but over time you will learn how to connect these scale shapes with intermediate shapes, and you'll unlock the entire fretboard for soloing!
On a right-handed guitar, your right hand can be mostly thought of as a rhythm instrument, just whacking away at strings like a drummer whacks at their drums. Whether you hit all the strings, some of them, or just 1 string at a time, the rhythmic aspect is what matters most. It takes practice to become fluent here, but looseness and fluidity is key. Eventually you can incorporate other techniques to change the timbre of the rhythms being played, but remember to keep the rhythm going in constant movement. (On a left-handed guitar or bass, this would apply to your left hand.)
Or it's possible they didn't like me saying that you can play with a band in just a few weeks of practice. Even though I think you definitely can if you focus on rhythm and moving roots or power chords around.
Some players don't know how to jam. It's fairly easy, and almost entirely rhythm based.
If it's the type of player that thinks playing a song is the same, I can see your point
Find a good physical therapist. There are some good ones out there, I promise. But you might need to travel and/or pay out of pocket. And the best source for good PT recs is friends in the same sport - so make friends with some ultra runners and ask them.
Hit the gym and do yoga. A big part of a lot of knee pain is instability in the low back and hips.
Read up on psychosomatic pain, and integrate exercises into PT and gym time.
The predatory FOMO nature of Games Workshop is real and harmful to the hobby as a whole. The editions of the games could last for years yet we're on a 3 year cycle to adjust stats and change rules that don't need changing. It creates a cycle of I liked this edition but everybody moved on so I'm forced to move up or give up on the game.
Luckily there's a million other games but they're micro in comparison. You're stuck either creating a community on your own or hoping there's a group within a reasonable distance that you can help with. If not... Sorry about your wasted investment.
If you do get sucked into it and you end up investing into every GW game system with multiple armies across every system, you're gonna run out of space. Unless you live in a multi story house or have a shed with nothing in it, these things take up space.
Yes, tabletop gaming is so much bigger and more varied than GW's games. I love 40k and Warhammer fantasy, but just as one part of the hobby.
The high pricing and FOMO churning is pretty perfected by GW. It is easy to fall into just thinking and buying GW products at MSRP. There are many ways to avoid it and play for much cheaper, but it means breaking out of the GW exclusive ecosystem. (I have many specific suggestions how to do this btw.)
I can't stand the modern tournament culture which has this sort of e-sports stink on it.
As a mild piece of good news OnePageRules seems to have decent traction and isn't too difficult to find groups who play in stores. It has its shortcomings, but at least the rules aren't subject to the constant market driven churning updates.
Oh I know there's so much more than GW. I got my start with Warmachine. I had a group of 6 that met bi weekly for years until the game imploded. Then we scattered. Infinity was the next big thing. That got two of us and another from the store I frequented that wasn't apart of the Warmachine group. Then that dwindled and all that's left is GW.
We tried converting some of the 40k players to Infinity. They all like the look, like the idea, see the elaborate tables we cook up, and show enthusiasm for the game. None of them pull the trigger. There's never a right time. It's like trying to pull Artax out of the mud.
I understand both sides because I had a friend try to get me into Otherside and iirc that game doesn't even exist anymore.
OPR skirmish is the easiest to talk people into since it uses GW minis they probably already own. All it needs is people reading the free rules and making a list. It feels like a proper skirmish game instead of the strange hero battle game modern Kill Team is. This is doable if a store has a Discord or something to do barebones meetup planning even with strangers.
A little more difficult, but doable if you've eased people into alternate ideas is getting people to agree to an older 40k edition. It requires buying or, uh, finding the rules and codexes, but it sidesteps the problem of constant rules changes. My preference is 3e (I have very little personal interest in Primaris marines) which is much less bloated than modern armies of the same points value.
What the consumables are. As a noob, you don't look at a metal bike cassette and think "that's going to wear out". Or at a metal 3d printer nozzle. Or at paint brushes (I keep ruining expensive ones! 😭).
Hey! Long time artist here who paints all kinds of things, from metal lawn art to actual paintings. Rule number one- wash your bushes out in cool water, not hot or warm, as hot water can loosen the glue that holds the bristles in. Second get a small tub of brush restorer. A little goes a long way. Once the brush is dry, add a little brush restorer and reshape the tip and bristles. You can use sharp sizzors to clip and stray brush hairs that won't stay in place. And keep paining!
Restoring old business laptops will usually get you a better laptop than buying a budget new one that costs the same.
Retired business machines are also fantastic for “server in a bedroom closet” types of setups. When IT retires an entire department’s desktops, they’re forced to list them for sale, because the bean counters want to see that they got something back from them. IT doesn’t care how much they sell for, and are just listing them to get them out of the way. And since they’re listing like 50 of them at a time, the listings end up competing with each other to lower the price. No gamer is selling their two year old battle station unless they need the money, which means they’ll be looking to get top dollar for it… But the bored Help Desk 1 worker got assigned the task of selling them because nobody else wanted to do it, sees it as busywork, and knows they won’t personally see a single cent of the resale price. So they don’t care what the final price is.
The machines are usually very lightly used. Typically only used for running MS Office, answering emails, and browsing Facebook. This can be true even for the top-of-the-line laptops… Because the CEO will throw a fit if he notices his laptop is older or cheaper than the graphic artists’ laptops are… Even though the graphic artists need a dedicated GPU and lots of RAM for their CAD, video editing, etc… While the CEO only uses it to answer like three emails a week. So the C-suite tends to get upgrades to the newest model every year, even though they don’t need it. And last year’s model gets listed for sale.
Oh, absolutely! My primary laptop is a t430 that I got for $50, got the charger for $7, a replacement CPU and RAM for $50 each. Runs better than my partner's budget PC from a couple years ago. Still needs a new battery, but those aren't too expensive either. It's at 20-25% of the manufacturer capacity now.
I'm pretty sure my server was one of those, though. 1tb HDD, 16GB ram, no idea the other specs, but it was $100. Said it was new, but I 100% do not believe that because the RAM/HDD alone would cost $100 new
No, for knitting xD At this point I do an org-mode list of every row in the pattern with checkboxes, then tick them off as I do them. Way nicer, especially for patterns you have to reference multiple parts at the same time for
Just hit C-c C-c when the row's done to mark it. It took me about 30 minutes to get the file set up, mostly because there are 45 sections like the "Field 1", most patterns would just go straight through to whatever the final row is. Plus the pattern's split into 3 columns, and a PDF, which is notoriously painful to convert to anything.
But yeah, no fancy configs, just basic org-mode functionality. I don't code much at all, I just use org-mode because it's been the best PKM tool I've found for myself.
If anyone's curious about the pattern, it's the Phoenix Wing Shawl by Nadine Schwingler on Ravelry
Not sure if they meant column counter since you can easily get that too with Ctrl+x = if your cursor is over a character.
Line counts appear at the bottom of the emacs window by default but has a limit where it stops incrementing somewhere in the 10,000s. Also would be slower to return a value since it needs to open the file to get the count, unlike wc -l which is virtually instantaneous.
Some game features may sound awesome but aren't really fun for me.
For example, “let's try to model the skills of PCs in a granular way by giving them loads of skills”. This is how The Burning Wheel tries to model character skills. Sorry, Burning Wheel fans! I do like the intention, though. It's just too much paperwork and cognitive load.
Another example is “let's try to model the skills of NPCs in a granular way by giving them long stat-blocks". This is how DnD 5e does it. Sorry, 5e fans! Again, it's just too much paperwork and cognitive load.
What I learned from this is that games that are fun for me do not try to model the game world at a granular level. Instead, what really matters to me is choosing a game that consistently enables meaningful choice and is ergonomic.
As to GM technique, forget about planning plots and buying gimmicks. Instead, get good at creating interesting scenarios and making rulings. I learned this by reading The Alexandrian’s book on GMing.
I've heard good things about cypher but I've never really heard of Apocalypse World. Sounds cool!
I've been playing Pathfinder 2e, but I don't play via pen and paper, so a lot of the annoying maths and granular things are automated via foundry, thank god
If you’re interested in Cypher or Apocalypse World, you’re in luck. Both are being updated as we speak and will be re-released this year!
Apocalypse World changed my life, at least my TTRPG life. The GMing chapter alone is worth the whole book’s price.
As to computers being in charge of crunch and granularity in TTRPGs, I’m glad that that’s possible. It makes crunchier games more accessible.
Heck, maybe in the future there’ll be a TTRPG that requires software to make complicated calculations. It could enable complex game economies, economies of battle, of skills, of inventory… — economies that aren’t easy to manage with mental math.
For now, I think I’ll stick to accessibility and simplicity. Still, I’m excited to see what kinds of great games people will come up with!
For cycling, more expensive parts don’t really help much. Mid range everything is fine. I don’t need clip on pedals, regular ones are great. For kayaking, anything inflatable is really slower than hard sides and it matters for the enjoyment.
I started with inflatable as it was super cheap. Got a rigid one now. Used it a lot before but since moving house it's a longer walk to the sea and I usually cycle there to swim instead. Would like to take the kayak out again, but it's like an hour round trip walking with a kayak to get to water, I can cycle it in under 10 minutes.
Can you also carry the bike on the kayak after though? Not sure if salt water spray on the bike is good for it either. If I don't have the bike with me I would probably just get back to no bike.
I got into retro computing during lockdown. Kind of a nostalgia thing. Refurbed My Atari ST and ZX Spectrum. Got an Amiga, and Amstrad CPC464 and an old Atari 2600. Spent a lot of money and did loads of mods. Now they just sit there and I have no idea what to do with them. The games and demos were a fun novelty, but I'm not really a gamer. I don't want to sell them, but they don't really bring me any joy either. I'm pretty happy, mostly and have a good family life. Certainly not depressed. But yeah, this kit is just sitting in my den, rarely used. Probably should have anticipated that before I got so deep into it.
I had them playing Golden Axe, Pang, IK+ and Stuntcar Racer, when they were about 6 and 8. They did love it, but it can't hold their attention the way Fortnite, FIFA, Minecraft and Harry Potter games on the playstation do, sadly.
Know the feeling! Although I do a fair bit of gaming, it's more the overwhelming choice of every single game every released and being paralysed by so much choice!
How about some retro software? Music, 3D modelling, pixel art, programming etc. Plenty of those on the Amiga.
There's a lot I don't know about the Amiga. I was always an ST kid, and viewed Amigas with a jealous resentment! There's definitely a lot to learn and do with it, but I don't feel the same connection as I do to my ST, despite it's shortcomings. That said, the dilemma still remains. I'm just not that excited by them. It's definitely a 'me problem!'
Bodybuilding style Lifting. Wish I knew that science based influencers are just using science as a gimmick to make new videos and bold claims for short form content.
Lifting is hard when done right but its not super complex. The basics are the same they were decades ago:
be consistant and stick to a routine at least 6 months.
Learn the proper lift techniques
learn how to train to failure (failure is not mandatory every set but you need to know where it is in order to train close to it for adaptations to occur)
Keep progressing weights when you can without sacrificing technique. (Progressive overload is both the driver and the result of muscle growth, as long as your work sets are close to failure the growth stimilus is there)
3d printing, specifically FDM with PLA since I'm not down to mess with the chemicals for a resin printer. Keep printing until you're out of an opened filament roll, otherwise your filament will absorb water and degrade. I often learn filament goes bad when a tiny piece breaks off in the feeder right above the heating element, requiring some annoying disassembly to diagnose and correct the problem. If you're not sure what to build with the last bit of filament, a small square trash can/pencil holder is always useful.
Stick to a maintenance schedule. Putting off a lubrication or dusting can lead to debris getting stuck somewhere and ruining a print when you least expect it. Also learn about every component in your printer and how to get a replacement when it inevitably breaks. That way you can purchase a few of the more commonly broken parts to lower printer downtime.
Start off with a brand name printer that does auto leveling. That cheap CR10 you bought for a hundred dollars sounds like a bargain until you realize it can't print a solid first layer, causing all sorts of other minor annoyances with your print quality. Trying and failing to fix the issues might eventually turn you off on pursuing the hobby.
I was already well versed in Solidworks, but learn how to use a CAD program. You can get a lot of use from the many publicly available models out there but you might eventually have an idea or require something that requires a custom design. Being able to physically manifest your own design ideas quickly was a big drawing point for me to get into the hobby.
I would go so far as to say, if you aren't interested in learning CAD or some other 3D modeling software, forget a 3D printer. Because if you rely on Thingiverse and Printables, your 3D printer is a trinket machine. You're going to print a few toys, a benchy or two, a paper towel holder that doesn't work, a shop vac adapter that's the wrong size, a phone stand the $200 Creality you bought just cannot get through, and then it'll sit gathering dust.
I've only ever modified files I've found online, never designed anything myself in Cad and I find plenty of real uses for my 3d printer. It probably paid for itself just printing organization bins and other things for the house. Just last week I bought some cheap shelves from IKEA clearance without any hardware, printed out some feet and now I have a new monitor stand. I regularly print accessories that I would otherwise have to pay extra for (like tripod mounting plates)
Plus there are some pretty amazing projects out there that get a lot cheaper if you have access to a printer. Personally I've printed a pair of astronomy binoculars https://www.analogsky.co/ and a custom mechanical keyboard fitted to my hand. https://ryanis.cool/cosmos/beta
If you have a continuous and frequent need or strong desire for small plastic objects. If you have a hobby like cosplaying, cosplayers find 3D printers quite useful for making costume parts or props, tabletop players like printing minifigures or playsets, if you're an electronics hobbyist it can be useful to print cases and enclosures for projects, if you're a woodworker you'll never stop needing jigs, brackets, vacuum hose adapters.
Or, if you're interested in 3D printing itself. There are folks doing like, 4-axis non-planar stuff that's industry leading, for the fun of it. Hell and gone smarter than I am.
Should I skip the owning part and just use commercial 3D print shops?
If you have one project in mind, or "might occasionally find a use for it," hire it done rather than buying a machine.
There's kind of a trap for newbies to 3D printing: Inexpensive printers tend to be projects unto themselves. Which can be a good thing if you're interested in the hobby of 3D printing itself. If you want to buy a machine, plug it in and it just works, expect to spend $1000. Because you're either going to buy a Prusa, which start at about $1000 for an assembled MK4S, or a Bambu Labs machine for about $500 and then they'll getcha somehow. Bambu Labs sketches the fuck out of me, they're trying to be the HP of FDM.
Even then, if you have one of the "just works" machines, you still have things to learn. What plastic to choose for this model that needs to be outdoors? Do you use a textured or smooth sheet for PETG? Can you print ASA without a heated enclosure? Should you use glue stick for TPU? Can you print PC-CF with a brass nozzle? What do the eight pages of print settings in the slicer do? If you can envision the printer sitting turned off for months at a time, does all that seem worth learning?
What do I do to make it more than a trinket printer?
Mainly, have something you need to 3D print for.
I have found that Thingiverse and Printables are both full of idiots. They let literally anyone on there, and I've found the dumbest shit.
"It's 7% shorter in the X axis because my printer prints 7% long in that direction so I squish all my parts to compensate. And then I upload them like that because my mom let me eat paint chips as a baby" has to be my favorite, right after "This design relies heavily on trapping hex nuts in hexagonal recesses, and I looked up the "diameter" of M3 nuts and modeled that as the across flats dimension because my mom is my dad's mom!"
If you want to print anything other than flexible dragons and Bender Bhuddas, and then actually use them, you're going to need to know how to alter things other people ruined through incompetence, or design things from scratch. The ability to design the thing YOU need is what really unlocks the power of a 3D printer.
What do I do to make it more than a trinket printer.
CAD is just a tool. You can use it to make more trinkets yourself or create a special bed basket, custom camera bracket, etc. If you see something at work or home that could benefit from a product that doesn't exist yet, you might be able to design and print a fixture for it.
Why should I get a printer.
Unless you're constantly coming up with things to print then you don't. Plenty of libraries offer free 3d printing services but keep in mind you get what you pay for. If you're lucky, some universities or hacker spaces might let you use their printers and are of generally higher quality.
Should I skip the owning part and just use commercial 3d print shops?
It gets expensive very quickly. Most commercial places I've dealt with for work will rip you off because they're targeting industries that have more money than common sense. I once needed to print a few simple boxes with ESD safe filament and they wanted over 400 dollars for just one. A lower end prusa costs the same as 3 of those prints so it made more sense for us to purchase our own printer and filament and make it ourselves. The cost of making additional fixtures plummeted too once we considered avoiding some traditionally machined parts in favor of printed ones.
PLA does not absorb moisture. You can submerge a roll in water overnight, dry it and print just fine after. It does become brittle eventually just being exposed to the elements though. Either vacuum seal your filament in bags with a desiccant and store in a dark place or use it within 3-6 months of opening a roll as a general rule of thumb. Shorter timespan if you keep it in the light and if your ambient room temperature fluctuates considerably.
PETG on the other hand will absorb moisture and will crackle like a bag of popcorn when it tries to print with wet filament as it gets superheated at the nozzle level.
Also cheap printers are absolutely asinine for proper workloads, but if you’re a tinkerer that learns “on the job” so to speak while troubleshooting the nonsense you’ll see your prints perform, then it’s usually a great starting point, otherwise yeah, quality and reliability costs extra.
I should have been less willing to buy an electric bass that's too heavy to me. I got a maple-body Jazz Bass ~10 years ago, back then it was kinda heavy but fine for me, today I'm quite a bit less fit than I was then and no amount of wide, cushioned straps are able to make this a good experience for me nowadays, and since I play lefty it's a PITA to sell it. Until the shoulder and back pain kick in it does sound and play great, though.
IMO, Ibanez Soundgear has the best ergonomics as far as relatively affordable basses go that aren't headless - pretty lightweight and yet the opposite of top-heavy. I never liked their sound out of the box, though, and aftermarket pickups that fit the cavities without woodworking are kinda expensive.
Typewriters - mostly just buying/using them, haven't delved too much into the actual restoration/cleaning part just yet:
There's a Discord that has a lot of information and a nice, welcoming community.
Typewriter Database is a very handy tool to help you identify your typewriter model and year based on the serial number.
The case can get messed up depending what you clean with, so do your research well so that you don't accidentally strip the paint.
Estate/garage sales are great for finding typewriters.
When buying a typewriter, bring a piece of paper with you and test it out: type with every key, use the shift and caps lock, try the red and black inks, backspace, tab, set a few tabs and then tab through each one, reach the end of the line and see if the bell rings, etc. Don't let social anxiety get in the way of you testing a product before buying, especially if it's costing a pretty penny.
Speaking of price, I'm not sure how it is everywhere, but where I am you can get a good typewriter for under $100, even under $50, fairly consistently. I just went on OfferUp and I was able to find a few at around $50 that I would purchase myself tonight if I wasn't already strapped for cash.
The few typewriters I would spend over $100 on if I had the money (all in working condition, even better if it has a case): Royal Model 10 with the glass side, Olivetti Lettera 33, and the Hermes Baby.
For digital photography, the only thing I wish I really knew was how to clean the sensor sooner. I made a decent choice with the tech stack for the camera.
Do regular full body workouts/yoga/antagonist work. A lack of core strength and scapular stability will end up wrecking you if all you do is climb.
To get better at climbing, training helps a lot. But 90% of the training you need to do is just climbing more. Your problem isnt that you arent strong enough, it's that you havent developed the necessary techniques to climb harder because you havent experienced enough rock. 90% of the change you need to improve your climbing is simply to start consistently logging what you do in your climbing sessions.
Work your way up to climbing 20 pitches per day, 4 days per week, lowering the grade as much as needed to get the pitches in. You'll find your biggest problem here is simply time management and finding a willing partner. This is a great time to get used to leading, since almost all your pitches will be quite easy.
Once you can consistently get 20 pitches in per climbing day, start increasing the number of pitches at your onsight grade. Your sweet spot for progression is a climb that you may or may not be able to get on the onsight attempt, but which you will probably get second go. Aim to put 10 burns on onsight-level climbs per day.
Once you stop easily progressing through the grades week by week, your climbing logbook comes into its own. If you find that a certain grade feels like it would take more that 2 or so attempts to put down, start tracking sends in the grade below it. You are only allowed to be disappointed in your inability to send the new harder grade in when you have put down 100 sends on the grade below it.
When progress starts stagnating purely from increasing volume, start bouldering one or two days per week instead of rope climbing. It can be satisfying to send boulder problems, but spend at least some of your time on boulders that are so hard that you can only do one or two moves at a time - practicing doing just one or two extremely hard moves at a time is where you will really learn how to use your body. It is helpful to boulder in a big group, so you are forced to rest between burns.
The easiest way to improve at climbing is to climb a lot with people who are better than you. If you can do this, disregard all previous instructions and just go climbing with these people.
Sure. There are many paths to Babylon, and if your goal is to improve your climbing grade, and what you are doing is improving your climbing grade and is convenient and enjoyable for you, then there is no reason to change anything.
I suppose my main point is that climbers who are new to trying to push their grade often try to push their grade too early, and end up plateauing and becoming discouraged. If, for example, you are stuck at the V3 grade in the gym, you may be very motivated to climb V4. You will then wail on whatever V4 in the gym seems most doable for you for weeks, hoping that one of these times you actually stick the moves and send it. However, this pattern leads to slow progress, frustration (as you fail to send before they take the problem down), and possibly injury (due to repeating the same moves many times while tired).
So my point is that climbers seeking to push their grade for the first time should realize that movement - not strength or endurance - is the master skill, and the main way to improve is therefore to climb more mileage to improve their intuitive movement patterns. And if your goal is to rack up mileage, then you should track that mileage. If you want to send V4, but have only sent 5 V3s, you have no right to be dissappointed in your inability to send the harder grade, and the fastest way to send the harder grade is to climb a lot more at the easier grade.
So we start by increasing volume at a very easy grade, just to increase the number of routes/problems climbs in a typical session. Often this is enough to spur improvement, simply because it teaches the climber better time management. And as they increase the total amount of climbing they are doing, they are also spurring the necessary physiological adaptations to support long climbing sessions so they can accumulate more volume faster.
Then once they are regularly cranking out a sufficient amount of mileage, we start increasing difficulty. We say "how many climbs can you do at your onsight grade in a session?" We want them to be cranking out onsight or second-go sends, because this is usually the sweet spot for climbing improvement - just hard enough that you have to try, but not so hard that you get bogged down and turn it into a mega-proj. Then we simply say "okay, I know you are eager to get to X grade - but send 100 of X-1 first". This gives them a tangible, measureable goal to work towards. And with a high volume of X-1 climbing per session, hitting that mark feels acheiveable. Eg, if your goal is to send V4, but your onsight grade is V2, we say "Log 100 unique V2 sends before you start working on V3". If they are only sending 2 V2s per session and only climbing 2 days per week, then it will take them 25 weeks - nearly half a year minimum - to send 100! But if they are sending 10 V2s each session 4 days per week, then they will tick 100 in under a month with time to spare for additional rest days plus a 1 week vacation.
(An important aside - volume should be increased only as recovery allows. If the climber is showing up to every session with sore shoulders, achey elbows, and raw skin, they need more rest or less volume until they can handle the physiological demand. This is also where adding in a minimalist lifting routine or yoga practice can be helpful. As a lifting program for a new climber, I recommend 2 days per week, 3 sets of 3 or 2 sets of 5, adding weight to each set. one lift each for push pull and legs - switch up lifts every couple months to keep from getting bored. Keep the weights quite light - maybe 70% effort on the last rep of the last set, so that movement quality stays high. The whole workout should only take around 10 or 15 minutes, and you should walk out of the gym feeling limber and energized - I often like to use this style of workout as a warm up before pulling on to climb.)
Then, when the climber has racked up sufficient mileage at the lower grade but is still not progressing in the higher grade, we add in a more intense style of climbing - limit bouldering - since trying really hard will spur neurological and physiological adaptations in the muscles, teaching the climber to pull harder and maintain maximum body tension.
And then if this still does not spur improvement, we could talk about fingerboarding, technique drills, periodization, targeted lifting programs, or any number of other specialized techiques for spurring improvement. But the point is that we aren't going to add unnecessary complexity to our training until it is actually needed; and we are mostly going to improve at climbing by improving our movement via direct experience by doing (1) a lot of climbing and (2) very hard moves.
Contrast this with some more typical climbing routines -
The gym bouldering newbie. Shows up to the gym twice per week, and immediately walks over to the new set. After a short warm up, they work on 2 or 3 problems at their project grade until they are smoked, then maybe try a problem at their project grade +1, finding it utterly impossible. They progress very slowly, because they rack up mileage very slowly, and never actually try really hard moves when they are feeling fresh.
The weekend warrior large group climber. They show up to the crag with their crew of 20 people. They climb 1 warm up, then shakily lead up something at their onsight grade (praying they don't die as they make every clip, despite being completely safe), and finally wail on a toprope that was put up by the "strong" climber of the group before declaring that they are gassed and heading to the bar with everyone else. Again, they progress very slowly because they never actually climb that much.
The frustrated go-getter. They used to be in group 1 or 2, but are tired of climbing at a low grade, so they begin a highly structured 12 week climbing program with words like "mesocycle" and "anaerobic work capacity". Depending on how well the program was designed, they may progress quite reasonably... but now they've turned rock climbing from a fun activity with friends into another grinding chore.
Contrast with what I outlined above - each step is a simple, clear goal that can be applied to any given session. It is simple and intuitive to explain to a climbing partner "I want to climb 20 pitches today, no matter what" or "I want to climb 10 V5s today". You can have days when you just work on the new set with your friends or try to send the mega-proj (you just recognize that these days aren't moving you towards climbing harder as fast as possible). Climbing stays fun - it just now has different metrics for success depending on the day.
I have too many hobbies. Can never find enough time for everything. Gaming has probably been my longest and most expensive one though. Between all the hardware and software purchases I wish I had simply been more patient earlier in my engagement. Could have saved so much money. These days I cruise the steam sales for indies and I'm having a great time.
Needlework is hard on rhe hands. I wear compression gloves and wrist braces when cross stitxhing to minimize the impact on my hands. I need to talk to a doctor about my hands but i try to take good care of them even when playing games i wear a brace.
You get a much wider margin of error brewing 5 gallons in a bucket instead of starting with 1 gallon as a trial.
When I first made mead I just did a 1 gallon batch to see how it worked but that doesn't really leave you with enough of a must to do proper gravity measurements without losing half your yield.
Hydroponics, how heavy a 10 gallon tote is filled with water. With about 8 gallons of water in it, it's about 67 lbs. Thankfully I don't need to move my basic deep water culture setup and it's stable. It's been a great learning experience, but moving forward if I expand I'm going with the nutrient film technique.
Unless you work in IT, you can always start easy. Multiple brands offer solutions that are already configured, receive updates, and are properly managed. For example, ZimaBoard comes by default with CasaOS, a very user-friendly interface to cover all of your basic self-hosting needs.
You can also install CasaOS, Yunohost and other simple self-hosting solutions on any device, and it's not too complicated even if you never did anything of the kind before.
If you mainly want to replace cloud storage, there's a multitude of brilliant commercial NAS offerings by Synology, QNAP, ASUStor and others. The devices do all the complicated parts all by themselves, and even talk to your router to properly set the networking. They commonly come with all sorts of mobile apps and suites allowing you to easily manage everything on the go. They can even be used to self-host anything, just like a normal server!
As your home server is most likely to be based on Linux (most certainly Debian and its derivative, Ubuntu), knowing Debian/Ubuntu and Linux in general will help to ease its setup and maintenance.
If you have somewhat powerful hardware and want to host many things at once, Proxmox is a godsend. It has a fully functional GUI to manage everything (just don't be scared of many buttons and interface elements, you'll only need like 3 of them at first), it can manage resources very efficiently, reducing the server load, and it makes containerization and virtualization a breeze, so you don't have to think much about it.
Don't get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because wood is fiddly as fuck.
OR
DO get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because it will burn that shit right out of you If you don't die from an aneurysm first. It'll teach you to build all sorts of wiggle room into everything in life, not just furniture.
People will think what you made was amazing, that it took so much skill.
Nope.
Only you know how you put everything together loosely, then tightened screws incrementally while adjusting clamps and smacking it with a rubber mallet until it looked right. There are pilot holes they can't see that don't go anywhere. You definitely missed gluing something important. You might have weighted a piece with epoxy and cat litter because you forgot to buy weights, it was 3 am, and you were unintentionally high as balls on stain fumes, but you really wanted to finish in time to surprise your partner for their birthday.
They don't know, they'll never know, and they don't need to know.
Don't forget the thousands of dollars in tools you'll be compelled to buy and never being able to throw out even the small piece of wood because "you might need it someday".
Tell me about it, and there's always something better than what you have. How to be smart about buying tools deserves its own entire comment chain.
I didn't know about these until recently, but I now recommend folks check out local tool libraries to get started and see what they want or need for low to no cost.
We have a one car garage full of maintenance and fabrication tools I've acquired over my life. They've paid for themselves multiple times over in even just the last decade, but the cost and space requirements are prohibitive for a lot of folks. It's one of those "having money saves money" situations, but tool libraries can help a lot.
"It's made outta offcuts."
quietly pushes entire bespoke server rack under bed
My foray into woodworking began and ended with figuring "sheesh, custom picture frames are so expensive, how hard could it be?!"...
By the end of that experience, nothing felt real anymore. Every foolishly pure mathematical concept, every platonic ideal - shameful indulgences of the young and weak. Our grand edifices of knowledge, little more than piles of tattered rags with which we clothe our nakedness, arrogant and hubristic in our vulgar conceits.
Don't do it y'all. That abyss gazes back.
Underappreciated comment of the thread.
You need to conjure the ancient dark magics of woodworkers long past.
I shudder to imagine such might. Utter your shriveled curses to the unwary, fiend, not to me!
That's my dream, except I want to complicate it by building guitars. So it actually has to work, not just look like it might.
I can't build a guitar. I can build a guitar-shaped object. But I cannot build a guitar.
My partner complimented my new shelf recently. Then she looked closer and realised it was a few boards stacked up on the cheapest engineering bricks I could find but rotated so the holes are not visible.
Only got a folding hand saw which I suspect isn't the best for making straight cuts, I had considered cutting up a railway sleeper for blocks instead of the bricks. Bricks worked out cheaper. Wooden blocks could look nice though.
Just cut pieces of wood big enough to cover the front of the bricks, and glue them on. Wood on the front, and brick on the side, will look like a cool design choice.
After having worked with wood and son of a cabinet maker, I crave the strength and certainly of steel. I got into welding in a big way.some aluminium, but mostly steel. It's such a wonderful material. Cut it, weld it, grind it, bam, new and bigger steel. You can't make a piece of wood bigger.
shia_labeouf_slowclap.gif
LOL I learned so much from this, thank you.
And also: Fume and dust extraction is no joke!!
... but you'll know
I just tell everyone where all the mistakes were.
Eating all the food you cook will make you fat
Especially if you want to make "good" food. I'm not saying there isn't good food that is healthy for you. But if you want to make things taste like they do in a high end restaurant, it's probably going to require a shitload of butter/ghee and salt. And then probably cream. And also highly fatty meats.
It's usually just butter. So much fucking butter.
Anthropology: The study of mankind's quest for readily available fat.
And salt. Watch Gordon Ramsey season every single step.
The correct number of guitars to own is n+1, with n being the number of currently owned guitars.
Same for cameras, axes and chainsaws...
And bikes, and computers
And freeway lanes necessary to solve traffic
Civil engineering as a hobby, eh?
Tactical urbanism ftw!
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
Cats
Lenses maybe, camera bodies, nah.
Thnx mate! I owe you! Gonna Take this to my wife now !!
Always happy to help a brother out.
Dice. Definitely dice.
This is true for reptiles and snakes as well.
There are moments when it can be n+2...
Cocaine can become addictive really quickly
Skill issue
I have a pretty addictive personality and I thank the stars that I've never enjoyed coke on the handful of occasions I've tried it. It just made me feel overly talkative to the point of being annoying.
I have done a fair share of coke and while it was nice to be able to party for two days straight I never really felt addicted. But that's probably just me cause downers on the other hand my god that's shits addictive.
A ex heroin addict once told me that when I talked about the downers I was using that I sounded like an heroin addict and that I shouldn't ever try heroin. (Which I guess is great advice in general but the way she said it still stays with me)
Understandable, my brains already unfocussed jumping around, coke would just make me say all that shit out loud, downers would calm me down and make me feel normal
I'm basically coked out by default, it would simply keep me from blacking out or bring me out of one when I used to use it. Otherwise no change, it's the same with alcohol, it takes a lot to actually bring on a change, most people usually think I'm still sober or barely drunk blacked out apparently. Never really felt addicted to either, weed on the other hand, apparently not addictive, but it forsure ruins my mood when I try to quit. (Haven't drank in over 6 months, and had a fat gap before that, don't think of it, haven't used coke for over 2 years probably, don't think of it either, weed + nicotine I still use daily) I'm not trying to quit them either, just not around fun ppl or things to do since moving back home after college, so I just never think to do it.
Warhammer 40K is what some may call…MEGA EXPENSIVE.
I remember in college, when someone would get into MTG, we'd jokingly say coke's cheaper.
Now, when someone I know gets into 40k, I much less jokingly say "MTG's cheaper"
Then again, if you're just playing for fun against friends, a $200 3d printer is cheaper than any army I've seen. Still costs more than a $45 booster draft, but at least the printer's a one-time cost
Oh look, you just bought your way into a 3D printing hobby
I did that for unrelated reasons, I just 3d printed my way into a 40k hobby :P
I'm thanking my lucky stars I've newer really gotten along great with resin printing 😂
I only have an FDM printer xD You can still do a lot with it, though, especially if you're willing to get a heat gun involved. Though after printing out the character in my profile pic, I did realize there's a lot of small detail that gets lost with FDM.
Alas, though, small animals, a cat, and poor ventilation make resin printing a bad idea for me
Honestly, I don't find it a ton of fun. I use mine so occasionally, you kind of forget how little post processing you do on an FDM print for the most part. Though I definitely see the advantage for minis especially if you're going to paint it afterwards.
To piggy back on this, don't chase the fucking meta. By the time you get your Exaction Squad and paint it, GW will balance it into being a total waste of your time/money/points.
Wait, you didn't know this before getting into it? That's the first thing I ever heard about it, and I've never owned any 40K anything.
Come give Warmachine a shot, army sizes are usually smaller and the rules are less "my rule book was published more recently, that means I win" (Plus the models are slightly cheaper).
I thought that too. That's why i bought a resin 3d printer and made it 1000x more expensive, toxic and time-consuming. yey me
Losing Joann's has made it really difficult to find fabric locally. Michael's needs to step their game up.
Yeah, there really hasn’t been a good alternative for fabric. Lots of people were quick to jump on the “lol join the 21st century and just buy it online” side of the argument, but buying fabric is an extremely tactile experience. You need to feel it to know that it will have the correct texture, weight, see it will hang, which direction(s) it will stretch, how much it will stretch, how easy is is to stretch, etc for what you’re trying to make, because all of those qualities will heavily impact the end product. Those things are difficult to quantify, and nearly impossible to judge purely from photos on an online listing. Two fabrics that look identical online can have vastly different weights, stretch, textures, etc…
It's miserable. It was such a good store, Michael's doesn't compare for fabric yet. Hoping they get as much fabric as they've been sending me emails, might get a lot then lol
Move to Chicago, we have good local stores for fabric.
In cheaper and more fun to get parts from the junk yard.
Except the number of pick and pull yards seems to be dropping by the day.
I did astronomy like 25 years ago, yes a good telescope is kind of $$$, eyepieces, etc. I wanted to do some astro-photo but back in the days it was top$. But anyway the biggest problem, being in eastern Canada, is that you can only use it at night (hé), and in winter it is so freaking cold it's almost unusable, so you only have summer where night starts at like 10PM... When you have a life, job, house, partner, house, kids, name it, you don't have time or energy for this.
So I went to RC cars, cheaper!!! can be used during the day, even for 10 minutes, not requiring a setup, just take the remote and the car, make sure the battery is charged, that's it. Buy one for the kid too, bash them, take a brand like Traxxas and you can find cheap parts everywhere for 20 years.
For coding, I wish I had known that I will need to basically relearn the entire thing every 2-4 years due to frameworks and language design changes.
Tell me you're a front end programmer, without telling me you're a front end programmer.
I had to do FE for a freelance work, I learned Angular built the thing and delivered, a few year later I wanted to do some other stuff went to check Angular documentation and it had changed completely, plus no one else was using it because everyone had migrated to React.
Yea, its a big reason why I try to avoid FE like the plauge! As soon as you learn what everyone is using, everyone is using something else, or its going through a major rework that changes everything.
This is why I only use languages and libraries that are "finished." C, Pascal, Euphoria to name a few.
Absolutely isn't true though, unless you only learned JavaScript for some reason and god help you if that is what you call programming
Yep. Redesign the entire library every few weeks because you discovered a better architecture.
I kinda wish I considered my social anxiety and picked a better solitairy instrument than drums. They're super fun to play, but I was only ever in one band and I'm too anxious to play with strangers right now. I just jam by myself, but I suspect I'd have an easier time actually writing music if I had more experience with melody. I tried picking up guitar and violin later, but so far I haven't had the energy to really devote the time needed to learn another instrument.
Have you thought about an "MPC" type instrument like a Native Instruments Maschine? I feel like that might be a nice evolution for you as it would allow you to transition a love for percussion into a songwriting tool that is a blast to jam out with and make patterns with.
I mean, I really like nice finger drumming pads, but you could also just use a more traditional midi drum kit to record loops the point is that you can have a blast with an MPC type tool all by yourself with headphones on and you can then choose to share that or not, it is perfect as a solo instrument.
Bonus points you could record loops of yourself playing your actual drums and slice up the audio samples in an MPC, that would be super cool.
I also think as a drummer having an MPC might be really nice to throw loops of certain sections of songs into that you wanted to practice so that you could easily switch between them and keeping looping that section to practice as long as needed.
I had not thought about an mpc type instrument, but I'm going to look into it right now because that sounds cool lol
If you have a computer you can get a used/older NI Maschine for fairly cheap just make sure you get a software key. The pads feel really nice on those, but it is all down to preference.
A lot of people like the Ableton Push series of controllers but for me the pure playing feel of the Maschine is hard to beat and the ability to build loops into songs without looking at your computer screen while still having access to all the benefits of being connected to a computer (easy file access of samples for example) is really nice.
Go to Guitar Center or something and try out one, they are a blast I promise! They are inherently percussive instruments and I think having experience as a drummer is a great platform to enter into learning MPC type instruments from.
So I picked up a maschine+ because the standalone was important to me, and I'm absolutely loving it so far. Thanks again for the suggestion, this thing's awesome.
Damn that puts a big ass smile on my face, congrats for getting a new awesome instrument and composition tool!
Guitar is difficult to learn, especially if you don't know anything about music theory.
You might want to start with a basic digital piano, and learn basic keyboard skills, and music theory at the same time. As a drummer, you have good hand independence, and will probably pick up piano pretty quickly.
Music theory is a supremely elegant system, and you may find it soothing for your anxiety.
Here's your textbook
This is really intensely packed information, but EVERYTHING you need to know about music theory is on there, especially the basic stuff. You'll find lots of great explanations on YouTube. It's a lot like mathematics, one small thing leads to another, and it all develops into an elegant complex system built on logic at every step. Most of it becomes pretty intuitive once you figure out the basics.
When you get a keyboard, make sure to get one with weighted keys, so it feels like a real piano. I got a really nice Donner on sale, and it's lasted for years.
And of course practice every day. Try to get 20-30 minutes a day, either when you first get up, or before you go to bed, or preferably both. Make it a habit, and you'll get better quickly. Keep it up and you'll get fluid at reading music, and then it gets fun. You can be there in a year. You can take up the guitar next year.
And don't worry about playing with someone else, just learn to play keyboard and you can start making your own recordings on your computer, and you only have to play with yourself. That's what I do, along with guitar and bass. I wish I played drums, I have to use pads and program drum grooves.
It's a lifetime journey, have fun!
Can confirm, switch from drums to piano after trying the guitar.
I couldn't stick with the guitar but the keyboard, aw man, that's awesome.❤️
Yeah, the guitar is really hard, you have to really want to play. There's a long learning curve (endless, really), and it's not very intuitive, ESPECIALLY when it comes to theory. That's why guitarists have a much different approach to theory than other musicians.
Piano on the other hand, makes theory seem ridiculously easy, once you've mastered the notes on the staff.
I'm a guitarist, primarily, but I learned music theory getting a degree in music history about a million years ago, so I got the educational grounding BEFORE I really got into the guitar. It made it a LOT easier. I can't imagine learning proper theory on guitar. I run through chord progressions on the guitar just fine, but so much of early theory is harmonic note leading, and that can only be taught, and learned, properly on a keyboard.
Once you're decent on the keyboard, not a master or anything, but you know basic theory and can play some easy stuff, you can try to learn guitar, and transfer your knowledge over there. It should shorten the learning curve a bit, or at least make it less frustrating.
You're fingertips are still going to scream either way.
This resource is awesome, thanks for sharing!!
drummer here as well! I'm very glad to play the drums and not guitar or anything else. Okay, you're the loudest one, but you also have your own safe space. I really see my drums as a wall between me and the rest of the stage/the band. It's a comfort zone, a protection. Let the drums do the talking and hide behind your kit (figure of speech, not literally as that would be hard to play)
Unless you're Dave Grohl. Than you can jump right through that wall
I definitely had similar issues with bass, it would have made more sense for me to start with guitar. Though either way, I do my best work when I'm programming synths. And I never really got good enough at bass to play the kinds of lines that made me pick up bass in the first place, anyway ...
I started with guitar, but quickly grew bored with it because I'd rather play bass. Never really seriously played any instrument after that, though I have two guitars and three accordions laying around, along with another guitar, a ukelele and two keyboards from my kids. I guess I'm more of a collector.
I was fairly obsessed with bass, too, when I started playing instruments. I guess guitar never would have worked for me back then.
Buying more expensive and better gear will not make you better at it. I not even going to tell you what the hobby is because this applies to so many of them. If you can do your hobby with the gear you have and you think "oh man I wish I had that, I could do awesome things" - it's only worth it if you spend a whole lot of time on your hobby. If you're like me and you only spend a couple hours a week or month on your hobby, it's usually not worth it. Unless it's something that let's you do stuff faster. Because then you can do more in the few hours you have. I'm sure there are other exceptions to the rule, but in general, before you buy some shit, think to yourself "Do I really need this? Or do I just want it?"
"Meh, I'll upgrade the server RAM when I need it, zswap is working fine" <- clueless idiot from last year
Is your hobby guitar lol i'm curious
It is not, but it's music related. But I also have outdoors hobbies. And electronics hobbies.
I'm into playing guitar, bass and electronic music production, and IMO while there is definitely a "collecting instead of practicing/writing" issue to look out for, the right gear makes a pretty big difference. e.g. you do need a guitar with a good neck (not warped, good frets), you do need a guitar that's not too heavy for you, you do need software (or hardware, if that's your thing) with a workflow that works for you.
Currently struggling with the software part. Could well be that I'm just in a hole in general, but I was definitely more productive when I was making Game Boy chiptune with a simple tracker than I am with standard DAWs. At the same time, I'm very reluctant to enter into the rabbit hole of groove boxes, hardware sequencers etc.
Oh for sure, completely agree with all of that, but there is a point of diminishing returns. Like you definitely need functional equipment. And it's nice to have nicer equipment. But buying yet another guitar doesn't make you better at the guitar, and you can probably get better by practicing more often with what you have.
Don't get me started on music software. I could spend $10,000 a week on plugins that I would never use because they all look so awesome.
Sequencing on something like LSDJ is great because you are locked into this tiny little ecosystem and you have to get creative.
Definitely, just thought it needed clarification.
This exactly. When I use a standard DAW, I spend SO much time searching for (or making) samples, synth patches, tweaking effects to usually little effect, while the constraints of LSDj force me to have a relatively consistent sound from the get-go and into actually making music. Unfortunately, it's hard to translate that into something that isn't chiptune or some other genre that I don't particularly care for right now like rock.
Definitely applies to climbing. Technically more expensive shoes may help with certain climbs, it certainly won’t help a beginner.
Not sure what hobby this is, but honestly it goes for almost every one of my hobbies. Especially photography. I could probably just get good with my Canon EOS 40D for digital and my Canon EOS 300 for analog photography. But collecting new gear is so satisfying. There's always something new to improve. "If only I had X, then I could really do Y well". Though I at least feel like I've somewhat contained myself. I haven't bought any new camera or lens that was more than like 500 bucks, and honestly with what I have now I don't really feel the need to upgrade.
This does NOT go for watercolor painting! While you certainly dont need a lot of colors and brushes. The quality of both is paramount for progress and a decent outcome! Paper is even worse. You need a lot and of the expensive stuff. Acrylic paintig is not as bad but still...
... Sums up pretty much every hobby I have tried/am trying
This is the hardest part..
The benefits of keeping old devices. Before we moved several years ago, I had several computers/laptops, storage devices and some other miscellaneous devices that I'd be able to use and actually benefit from if I had kept them.
I have games that I can't get working on either Linux or newer versions of Windows.
Hard drives from old computers and laptops can be relatively cheaply converted into external hard drives and, while they wont be fast and possibly not reliable if used too much, they offer decent storage for the price.
I often use smaller storage devices (like SD cards and MP3 players) for transferring files from one computer to another and I also like to use them as temporary storage to preserve my hard drives when I don't need fast storage.
Another thing I wish I had known about, was just how quickly emulation would get good for older games. I've wasted so much money from buying older/retro consoles because I thought that emulation would stay as just a niche interest. Nowadays, while some games and systems are still iffy, you can emulate a wide variety of consoles and a lot of emulators even work well on some older and low end devices.
Old SD cards are so convenient. Pair them with a small USB card reader and you can carry a bunch of temporary storage in your pocket without buying anything extra.
Some games still don't work emulated, or at least didn't used to, like wrath unleashed
Climbing is fun but climbing outdoors requires mountains. Getting to mountains requires a car, or at least people willing to drive you.
Photosensitive polymer resin is nasty stuff, and stereolithography 3D printing requires a lot more safety considerations than FDM printing does! No regrets though, it’s still a lot of fun
My boss pushed us to research and acquire a resin printer a couple years ago. My coworker pushed the high-budget Form Labs direction due to his poor experience with resin printing in college. I had zero experience with resin (mostly only used Prusa FDM at that time) and pushed toward the relatively low budget Anycubic Photon direction, from the standpoint of "this is really not what we need to be doing with our budget, and this doesn't make sense for our use case, so I'll try to waste less money."
Now that my coworker's been gone for over a year, my boss thinks no one uses it because we don't know how. I know how, but FDM is just so much more approachable. I can swap filaments, click print, and walk away in about two minutes and trust that I'll come back to a usable part.
Changing out resin is its own special hell, and good luck if you have a print fail and have to clean off the bottom of the tray. I didn't get to a point of trusting prints to finish. Even when it does finish, you still have to wash and cure, and every part I ever made in resin seemed to be dimensionally unstable. Even the sample parts a Form Labs rep sent us were badly warped in shipping. The Photon hasn't been used in well over a year. CEO wants us to get rid of it, and I agree. Boss isn't letting go.
Meanwhile we just got two P2S printers that are cranking out parts like a champ. I would rather take a leisurely stroll across Eastern Ukraine than print with resin ever again.
I absolutely hate gunk on my hands, so I stuck with FDM.
FWIW, resin is toxic and you need to wear gloves to handle it. So the gunk would never be on your hands.
I wish I'd known how much pot space fruits and veggies need to thrive. Indeterminate tomatoes are supposed to have at least like 20 gallons.
Companion planting, friend! You can grow garlic and basil in the same pot. They all three work well together. Also, if it’s indeterminate, trim that thing. It doesn’t have to keep growing to produce. Learn to compost, too. Take care of your soil and it will take care of your plants.
Wait, are you counting garlic, basil and the pot, or how are you getting to three?
Same pot as the tomato.
Tomato + garlic + basil = 3 plants.
Ah, OK!
This is why I went with herbs for my small garden. 3m² of tomatoes will last a week, but that area of rosemary and sage will last indefinitely.
For guitar and bass:
As a very mediocre bassist who took lessons a long time ago, this is really good advice. Whoever down voted probably can't read
Maybe!
Or it's possible they didn't like me saying that you can play with a band in just a few weeks of practice. Even though I think you definitely can if you focus on rhythm and moving roots or power chords around.
Some players don't know how to jam. It's fairly easy, and almost entirely rhythm based. If it's the type of player that thinks playing a song is the same, I can see your point
That my knees were going to go to shit, and carrying a backpack through the mountains needs good knees. Fuck, I miss those trips.
Find a good physical therapist. There are some good ones out there, I promise. But you might need to travel and/or pay out of pocket. And the best source for good PT recs is friends in the same sport - so make friends with some ultra runners and ask them.
Hit the gym and do yoga. A big part of a lot of knee pain is instability in the low back and hips.
Read up on psychosomatic pain, and integrate exercises into PT and gym time.
That those forensics chaps can find the tiniest spatters of blood on your clothes, on your skin, and in your hair. And people make a lot of spatter.
Ah, a fellow taxidermist! Pleased to meet you
The predatory FOMO nature of Games Workshop is real and harmful to the hobby as a whole. The editions of the games could last for years yet we're on a 3 year cycle to adjust stats and change rules that don't need changing. It creates a cycle of I liked this edition but everybody moved on so I'm forced to move up or give up on the game.
Luckily there's a million other games but they're micro in comparison. You're stuck either creating a community on your own or hoping there's a group within a reasonable distance that you can help with. If not... Sorry about your wasted investment.
If you do get sucked into it and you end up investing into every GW game system with multiple armies across every system, you're gonna run out of space. Unless you live in a multi story house or have a shed with nothing in it, these things take up space.
Yes, tabletop gaming is so much bigger and more varied than GW's games. I love 40k and Warhammer fantasy, but just as one part of the hobby.
The high pricing and FOMO churning is pretty perfected by GW. It is easy to fall into just thinking and buying GW products at MSRP. There are many ways to avoid it and play for much cheaper, but it means breaking out of the GW exclusive ecosystem. (I have many specific suggestions how to do this btw.)
I can't stand the modern tournament culture which has this sort of e-sports stink on it.
As a mild piece of good news OnePageRules seems to have decent traction and isn't too difficult to find groups who play in stores. It has its shortcomings, but at least the rules aren't subject to the constant market driven churning updates.
Oh I know there's so much more than GW. I got my start with Warmachine. I had a group of 6 that met bi weekly for years until the game imploded. Then we scattered. Infinity was the next big thing. That got two of us and another from the store I frequented that wasn't apart of the Warmachine group. Then that dwindled and all that's left is GW.
We tried converting some of the 40k players to Infinity. They all like the look, like the idea, see the elaborate tables we cook up, and show enthusiasm for the game. None of them pull the trigger. There's never a right time. It's like trying to pull Artax out of the mud.
I understand both sides because I had a friend try to get me into Otherside and iirc that game doesn't even exist anymore.
OPR skirmish is the easiest to talk people into since it uses GW minis they probably already own. All it needs is people reading the free rules and making a list. It feels like a proper skirmish game instead of the strange hero battle game modern Kill Team is. This is doable if a store has a Discord or something to do barebones meetup planning even with strangers.
A little more difficult, but doable if you've eased people into alternate ideas is getting people to agree to an older 40k edition. It requires buying or, uh, finding the rules and codexes, but it sidesteps the problem of constant rules changes. My preference is 3e (I have very little personal interest in Primaris marines) which is much less bloated than modern armies of the same points value.
What the consumables are. As a noob, you don't look at a metal bike cassette and think "that's going to wear out". Or at a metal 3d printer nozzle. Or at paint brushes (I keep ruining expensive ones! 😭).
Hey! Long time artist here who paints all kinds of things, from metal lawn art to actual paintings. Rule number one- wash your bushes out in cool water, not hot or warm, as hot water can loosen the glue that holds the bristles in. Second get a small tub of brush restorer. A little goes a long way. Once the brush is dry, add a little brush restorer and reshape the tip and bristles. You can use sharp sizzors to clip and stray brush hairs that won't stay in place. And keep paining!
I just do miniature painting, so it's the really tiny detail brushes, keep ruining the tips trying to get into little corners.
Might have a look at the brush restorer.
For fine tip miniature work I have also put cheap hair gel on the brush tip to hold the piont. Milage may vary based on bushtype and technique.
Emacs makes a better row counter than basically anything else.
Restoring old business laptops will usually get you a better laptop than buying a budget new one that costs the same.
Retired business machines are also fantastic for “server in a bedroom closet” types of setups. When IT retires an entire department’s desktops, they’re forced to list them for sale, because the bean counters want to see that they got something back from them. IT doesn’t care how much they sell for, and are just listing them to get them out of the way. And since they’re listing like 50 of them at a time, the listings end up competing with each other to lower the price. No gamer is selling their two year old battle station unless they need the money, which means they’ll be looking to get top dollar for it… But the bored Help Desk 1 worker got assigned the task of selling them because nobody else wanted to do it, sees it as busywork, and knows they won’t personally see a single cent of the resale price. So they don’t care what the final price is.
The machines are usually very lightly used. Typically only used for running MS Office, answering emails, and browsing Facebook. This can be true even for the top-of-the-line laptops… Because the CEO will throw a fit if he notices his laptop is older or cheaper than the graphic artists’ laptops are… Even though the graphic artists need a dedicated GPU and lots of RAM for their CAD, video editing, etc… While the CEO only uses it to answer like three emails a week. So the C-suite tends to get upgrades to the newest model every year, even though they don’t need it. And last year’s model gets listed for sale.
Oh, absolutely! My primary laptop is a t430 that I got for $50, got the charger for $7, a replacement CPU and RAM for $50 each. Runs better than my partner's budget PC from a couple years ago. Still needs a new battery, but those aren't too expensive either. It's at 20-25% of the manufacturer capacity now.
I'm pretty sure my server was one of those, though. 1tb HDD, 16GB ram, no idea the other specs, but it was $100. Said it was new, but I 100% do not believe that because the RAM/HDD alone would cost $100 new
Second hand ThinkPads are absolutely brilliant value.
You mean like
wc -l?No, for knitting xD At this point I do an org-mode list of every row in the pattern with checkboxes, then tick them off as I do them. Way nicer, especially for patterns you have to reference multiple parts at the same time for
Wait, you're serious? You use emacs for knitting patterns? Fascinating.
I have no real interesting in knitting, but I would be interested in seeing this workflow.
The screenshot is in orgzly, but this is the actual file that I use. The source looks basically identical:
Just hit C-c C-c when the row's done to mark it. It took me about 30 minutes to get the file set up, mostly because there are 45 sections like the "Field 1", most patterns would just go straight through to whatever the final row is. Plus the pattern's split into 3 columns, and a PDF, which is notoriously painful to convert to anything.
But yeah, no fancy configs, just basic org-mode functionality. I don't code much at all, I just use org-mode because it's been the best PKM tool I've found for myself.
If anyone's curious about the pattern, it's the Phoenix Wing Shawl by Nadine Schwingler on Ravelry
Not sure if they meant column counter since you can easily get that too with
Ctrl+x =if your cursor is over a character.Line counts appear at the bottom of the emacs window by default but has a limit where it stops incrementing somewhere in the 10,000s. Also would be slower to return a value since it needs to open the file to get the count, unlike
wc -lwhich is virtually instantaneous.On, no, I meant for knitting! Gave the full example here
In tabletop roleplaying games:
What I learned from this is that games that are fun for me do not try to model the game world at a granular level. Instead, what really matters to me is choosing a game that consistently enables meaningful choice and is ergonomic.
What's your go to game system?
Apocalypse World :)
If the table (including myself) wants another setting, Cypher. If we want minimal crunch, Maze Rats.
What about you?
I've heard good things about cypher but I've never really heard of Apocalypse World. Sounds cool!
I've been playing Pathfinder 2e, but I don't play via pen and paper, so a lot of the annoying maths and granular things are automated via foundry, thank god
If you’re interested in Cypher or Apocalypse World, you’re in luck. Both are being updated as we speak and will be re-released this year!
Apocalypse World changed my life, at least my TTRPG life. The GMing chapter alone is worth the whole book’s price.
As to computers being in charge of crunch and granularity in TTRPGs, I’m glad that that’s possible. It makes crunchier games more accessible.
Heck, maybe in the future there’ll be a TTRPG that requires software to make complicated calculations. It could enable complex game economies, economies of battle, of skills, of inventory… — economies that aren’t easy to manage with mental math.
For now, I think I’ll stick to accessibility and simplicity. Still, I’m excited to see what kinds of great games people will come up with!
Meanwhile in Gamma World.
I want to know why I have to be naked all the time. I didn't sign up for this.
We tried it clothed, but the baby oil kept getting absorbed and it's impossible to find the right place to clamp.
They let you guys use oil? I need a better hobby group.
Baby oil, or baby powder? The gimp suit debate rages on.
For cycling, more expensive parts don’t really help much. Mid range everything is fine. I don’t need clip on pedals, regular ones are great. For kayaking, anything inflatable is really slower than hard sides and it matters for the enjoyment.
I started with inflatable as it was super cheap. Got a rigid one now. Used it a lot before but since moving house it's a longer walk to the sea and I usually cycle there to swim instead. Would like to take the kayak out again, but it's like an hour round trip walking with a kayak to get to water, I can cycle it in under 10 minutes.
There are trailers for bikes, that can carry a kayak :)
Can you also carry the bike on the kayak after though? Not sure if salt water spray on the bike is good for it either. If I don't have the bike with me I would probably just get back to no bike.
The person I met who did that had a foldable bike. Hmm, they were kayaking in fresh water, so yeah, maybe this doesn't work in your case
Making your bike more efficient is just making it less efficient at exercising you.
I got into retro computing during lockdown. Kind of a nostalgia thing. Refurbed My Atari ST and ZX Spectrum. Got an Amiga, and Amstrad CPC464 and an old Atari 2600. Spent a lot of money and did loads of mods. Now they just sit there and I have no idea what to do with them. The games and demos were a fun novelty, but I'm not really a gamer. I don't want to sell them, but they don't really bring me any joy either. I'm pretty happy, mostly and have a good family life. Certainly not depressed. But yeah, this kit is just sitting in my den, rarely used. Probably should have anticipated that before I got so deep into it.
Get your kids into it. Don't let them know modern games exist.
I had them playing Golden Axe, Pang, IK+ and Stuntcar Racer, when they were about 6 and 8. They did love it, but it can't hold their attention the way Fortnite, FIFA, Minecraft and Harry Potter games on the playstation do, sadly.
Know the feeling! Although I do a fair bit of gaming, it's more the overwhelming choice of every single game every released and being paralysed by so much choice!
How about some retro software? Music, 3D modelling, pixel art, programming etc. Plenty of those on the Amiga.
There's a lot I don't know about the Amiga. I was always an ST kid, and viewed Amigas with a jealous resentment! There's definitely a lot to learn and do with it, but I don't feel the same connection as I do to my ST, despite it's shortcomings. That said, the dilemma still remains. I'm just not that excited by them. It's definitely a 'me problem!'
Ah shame. Well, maybe the retro computing spark will come back for you eventually.
Bodybuilding style Lifting. Wish I knew that science based influencers are just using science as a gimmick to make new videos and bold claims for short form content.
Lifting is hard when done right but its not super complex. The basics are the same they were decades ago:
I wish I'd known how difficult it is to make a good, functional conlang. I badly underestimated this.
3d printing, specifically FDM with PLA since I'm not down to mess with the chemicals for a resin printer. Keep printing until you're out of an opened filament roll, otherwise your filament will absorb water and degrade. I often learn filament goes bad when a tiny piece breaks off in the feeder right above the heating element, requiring some annoying disassembly to diagnose and correct the problem. If you're not sure what to build with the last bit of filament, a small square trash can/pencil holder is always useful.
Stick to a maintenance schedule. Putting off a lubrication or dusting can lead to debris getting stuck somewhere and ruining a print when you least expect it. Also learn about every component in your printer and how to get a replacement when it inevitably breaks. That way you can purchase a few of the more commonly broken parts to lower printer downtime.
Start off with a brand name printer that does auto leveling. That cheap CR10 you bought for a hundred dollars sounds like a bargain until you realize it can't print a solid first layer, causing all sorts of other minor annoyances with your print quality. Trying and failing to fix the issues might eventually turn you off on pursuing the hobby.
I was already well versed in Solidworks, but learn how to use a CAD program. You can get a lot of use from the many publicly available models out there but you might eventually have an idea or require something that requires a custom design. Being able to physically manifest your own design ideas quickly was a big drawing point for me to get into the hobby.
I would go so far as to say, if you aren't interested in learning CAD or some other 3D modeling software, forget a 3D printer. Because if you rely on Thingiverse and Printables, your 3D printer is a trinket machine. You're going to print a few toys, a benchy or two, a paper towel holder that doesn't work, a shop vac adapter that's the wrong size, a phone stand the $200 Creality you bought just cannot get through, and then it'll sit gathering dust.
I've only ever modified files I've found online, never designed anything myself in Cad and I find plenty of real uses for my 3d printer. It probably paid for itself just printing organization bins and other things for the house. Just last week I bought some cheap shelves from IKEA clearance without any hardware, printed out some feet and now I have a new monitor stand. I regularly print accessories that I would otherwise have to pay extra for (like tripod mounting plates)
Plus there are some pretty amazing projects out there that get a lot cheaper if you have access to a printer. Personally I've printed a pair of astronomy binoculars https://www.analogsky.co/ and a custom mechanical keyboard fitted to my hand. https://ryanis.cool/cosmos/beta
Let's say I learn CAD.
What do I do to make it more than a trinket printer.
Why should I get a printer.
Should I skip the owning part and just use commercial 3d print shops?
I'm going to take these out of order.
If you have a continuous and frequent need or strong desire for small plastic objects. If you have a hobby like cosplaying, cosplayers find 3D printers quite useful for making costume parts or props, tabletop players like printing minifigures or playsets, if you're an electronics hobbyist it can be useful to print cases and enclosures for projects, if you're a woodworker you'll never stop needing jigs, brackets, vacuum hose adapters.
Or, if you're interested in 3D printing itself. There are folks doing like, 4-axis non-planar stuff that's industry leading, for the fun of it. Hell and gone smarter than I am.
If you have one project in mind, or "might occasionally find a use for it," hire it done rather than buying a machine.
There's kind of a trap for newbies to 3D printing: Inexpensive printers tend to be projects unto themselves. Which can be a good thing if you're interested in the hobby of 3D printing itself. If you want to buy a machine, plug it in and it just works, expect to spend $1000. Because you're either going to buy a Prusa, which start at about $1000 for an assembled MK4S, or a Bambu Labs machine for about $500 and then they'll getcha somehow. Bambu Labs sketches the fuck out of me, they're trying to be the HP of FDM.
Even then, if you have one of the "just works" machines, you still have things to learn. What plastic to choose for this model that needs to be outdoors? Do you use a textured or smooth sheet for PETG? Can you print ASA without a heated enclosure? Should you use glue stick for TPU? Can you print PC-CF with a brass nozzle? What do the eight pages of print settings in the slicer do? If you can envision the printer sitting turned off for months at a time, does all that seem worth learning?
Mainly, have something you need to 3D print for.
I have found that Thingiverse and Printables are both full of idiots. They let literally anyone on there, and I've found the dumbest shit.
"It's 7% shorter in the X axis because my printer prints 7% long in that direction so I squish all my parts to compensate. And then I upload them like that because my mom let me eat paint chips as a baby" has to be my favorite, right after "This design relies heavily on trapping hex nuts in hexagonal recesses, and I looked up the "diameter" of M3 nuts and modeled that as the across flats dimension because my mom is my dad's mom!"
If you want to print anything other than flexible dragons and Bender Bhuddas, and then actually use them, you're going to need to know how to alter things other people ruined through incompetence, or design things from scratch. The ability to design the thing YOU need is what really unlocks the power of a 3D printer.
CAD is just a tool. You can use it to make more trinkets yourself or create a special bed basket, custom camera bracket, etc. If you see something at work or home that could benefit from a product that doesn't exist yet, you might be able to design and print a fixture for it.
Unless you're constantly coming up with things to print then you don't. Plenty of libraries offer free 3d printing services but keep in mind you get what you pay for. If you're lucky, some universities or hacker spaces might let you use their printers and are of generally higher quality.
It gets expensive very quickly. Most commercial places I've dealt with for work will rip you off because they're targeting industries that have more money than common sense. I once needed to print a few simple boxes with ESD safe filament and they wanted over 400 dollars for just one. A lower end prusa costs the same as 3 of those prints so it made more sense for us to purchase our own printer and filament and make it ourselves. The cost of making additional fixtures plummeted too once we considered avoiding some traditionally machined parts in favor of printed ones.
PLA does not absorb moisture. You can submerge a roll in water overnight, dry it and print just fine after. It does become brittle eventually just being exposed to the elements though. Either vacuum seal your filament in bags with a desiccant and store in a dark place or use it within 3-6 months of opening a roll as a general rule of thumb. Shorter timespan if you keep it in the light and if your ambient room temperature fluctuates considerably.
PETG on the other hand will absorb moisture and will crackle like a bag of popcorn when it tries to print with wet filament as it gets superheated at the nozzle level.
Also cheap printers are absolutely asinine for proper workloads, but if you’re a tinkerer that learns “on the job” so to speak while troubleshooting the nonsense you’ll see your prints perform, then it’s usually a great starting point, otherwise yeah, quality and reliability costs extra.
I didn't need to buy a base amount of Legos to create my own designs.
I should have been less willing to buy an electric bass that's too heavy to me. I got a maple-body Jazz Bass ~10 years ago, back then it was kinda heavy but fine for me, today I'm quite a bit less fit than I was then and no amount of wide, cushioned straps are able to make this a good experience for me nowadays, and since I play lefty it's a PITA to sell it. Until the shoulder and back pain kick in it does sound and play great, though.
IMO, Ibanez Soundgear has the best ergonomics as far as relatively affordable basses go that aren't headless - pretty lightweight and yet the opposite of top-heavy. I never liked their sound out of the box, though, and aftermarket pickups that fit the cavities without woodworking are kinda expensive.
Ubass https://kalabrand.com/collections/new-ubass-arrivals
So much fun.
Make everything yourself, do it cheap, because I drop hobbies like a mutha fucker.
Typewriters - mostly just buying/using them, haven't delved too much into the actual restoration/cleaning part just yet:
For digital photography, the only thing I wish I really knew was how to clean the sensor sooner. I made a decent choice with the tech stack for the camera.
Rock climbing:
wow
I can keep going, lol. This is the tip of the iceberg
ok first of all what is a grade
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_(climbing)
Can I progress on a diet of 95% bouldering and indoor centres?
Sure. There are many paths to Babylon, and if your goal is to improve your climbing grade, and what you are doing is improving your climbing grade and is convenient and enjoyable for you, then there is no reason to change anything.
I suppose my main point is that climbers who are new to trying to push their grade often try to push their grade too early, and end up plateauing and becoming discouraged. If, for example, you are stuck at the V3 grade in the gym, you may be very motivated to climb V4. You will then wail on whatever V4 in the gym seems most doable for you for weeks, hoping that one of these times you actually stick the moves and send it. However, this pattern leads to slow progress, frustration (as you fail to send before they take the problem down), and possibly injury (due to repeating the same moves many times while tired).
So my point is that climbers seeking to push their grade for the first time should realize that movement - not strength or endurance - is the master skill, and the main way to improve is therefore to climb more mileage to improve their intuitive movement patterns. And if your goal is to rack up mileage, then you should track that mileage. If you want to send V4, but have only sent 5 V3s, you have no right to be dissappointed in your inability to send the harder grade, and the fastest way to send the harder grade is to climb a lot more at the easier grade.
So we start by increasing volume at a very easy grade, just to increase the number of routes/problems climbs in a typical session. Often this is enough to spur improvement, simply because it teaches the climber better time management. And as they increase the total amount of climbing they are doing, they are also spurring the necessary physiological adaptations to support long climbing sessions so they can accumulate more volume faster.
Then once they are regularly cranking out a sufficient amount of mileage, we start increasing difficulty. We say "how many climbs can you do at your onsight grade in a session?" We want them to be cranking out onsight or second-go sends, because this is usually the sweet spot for climbing improvement - just hard enough that you have to try, but not so hard that you get bogged down and turn it into a mega-proj. Then we simply say "okay, I know you are eager to get to X grade - but send 100 of X-1 first". This gives them a tangible, measureable goal to work towards. And with a high volume of X-1 climbing per session, hitting that mark feels acheiveable. Eg, if your goal is to send V4, but your onsight grade is V2, we say "Log 100 unique V2 sends before you start working on V3". If they are only sending 2 V2s per session and only climbing 2 days per week, then it will take them 25 weeks - nearly half a year minimum - to send 100! But if they are sending 10 V2s each session 4 days per week, then they will tick 100 in under a month with time to spare for additional rest days plus a 1 week vacation.
(An important aside - volume should be increased only as recovery allows. If the climber is showing up to every session with sore shoulders, achey elbows, and raw skin, they need more rest or less volume until they can handle the physiological demand. This is also where adding in a minimalist lifting routine or yoga practice can be helpful. As a lifting program for a new climber, I recommend 2 days per week, 3 sets of 3 or 2 sets of 5, adding weight to each set. one lift each for push pull and legs - switch up lifts every couple months to keep from getting bored. Keep the weights quite light - maybe 70% effort on the last rep of the last set, so that movement quality stays high. The whole workout should only take around 10 or 15 minutes, and you should walk out of the gym feeling limber and energized - I often like to use this style of workout as a warm up before pulling on to climb.)
Then, when the climber has racked up sufficient mileage at the lower grade but is still not progressing in the higher grade, we add in a more intense style of climbing - limit bouldering - since trying really hard will spur neurological and physiological adaptations in the muscles, teaching the climber to pull harder and maintain maximum body tension.
And then if this still does not spur improvement, we could talk about fingerboarding, technique drills, periodization, targeted lifting programs, or any number of other specialized techiques for spurring improvement. But the point is that we aren't going to add unnecessary complexity to our training until it is actually needed; and we are mostly going to improve at climbing by improving our movement via direct experience by doing (1) a lot of climbing and (2) very hard moves.
Contrast this with some more typical climbing routines -
The gym bouldering newbie. Shows up to the gym twice per week, and immediately walks over to the new set. After a short warm up, they work on 2 or 3 problems at their project grade until they are smoked, then maybe try a problem at their project grade +1, finding it utterly impossible. They progress very slowly, because they rack up mileage very slowly, and never actually try really hard moves when they are feeling fresh.
The weekend warrior large group climber. They show up to the crag with their crew of 20 people. They climb 1 warm up, then shakily lead up something at their onsight grade (praying they don't die as they make every clip, despite being completely safe), and finally wail on a toprope that was put up by the "strong" climber of the group before declaring that they are gassed and heading to the bar with everyone else. Again, they progress very slowly because they never actually climb that much.
The frustrated go-getter. They used to be in group 1 or 2, but are tired of climbing at a low grade, so they begin a highly structured 12 week climbing program with words like "mesocycle" and "anaerobic work capacity". Depending on how well the program was designed, they may progress quite reasonably... but now they've turned rock climbing from a fun activity with friends into another grinding chore.
Contrast with what I outlined above - each step is a simple, clear goal that can be applied to any given session. It is simple and intuitive to explain to a climbing partner "I want to climb 20 pitches today, no matter what" or "I want to climb 10 V5s today". You can have days when you just work on the new set with your friends or try to send the mega-proj (you just recognize that these days aren't moving you towards climbing harder as fast as possible). Climbing stays fun - it just now has different metrics for success depending on the day.
About me when it comes to all of my hobbies: I like to collect things.
I have too many hobbies. Can never find enough time for everything. Gaming has probably been my longest and most expensive one though. Between all the hardware and software purchases I wish I had simply been more patient earlier in my engagement. Could have saved so much money. These days I cruise the steam sales for indies and I'm having a great time.
Needlework is hard on rhe hands. I wear compression gloves and wrist braces when cross stitxhing to minimize the impact on my hands. I need to talk to a doctor about my hands but i try to take good care of them even when playing games i wear a brace.
You get a much wider margin of error brewing 5 gallons in a bucket instead of starting with 1 gallon as a trial.
When I first made mead I just did a 1 gallon batch to see how it worked but that doesn't really leave you with enough of a must to do proper gravity measurements without losing half your yield.
It eats too much time (and money).
IIT: lots of wisdom
If the suction is too strong, a vacuum can injure your penis.
Obligatory WKYK
So can a mini-M&Ms tube…
Hydroponics, how heavy a 10 gallon tote is filled with water. With about 8 gallons of water in it, it's about 67 lbs. Thankfully I don't need to move my basic deep water culture setup and it's stable. It's been a great learning experience, but moving forward if I expand I'm going with the nutrient film technique.
Selfhosting.
Should have never done it.
But it also helpened me with my job
Some useful self-hosting advice:
that there are no women
The legality