We followed this guide https://www.handymanwire.com/articles/gardenbenchplans.html. This is my first real project since moving out on my own, and my first time ever doing a (carpentry) joint. I'm overjoyed with the results! I'm very ignorant with regards to lacquer, varnish, stain, sealant etc., any guidance in that area would be very helpful.

It had served me well for the last 2 years. I accidentally hit a rock on the backswing and it broke into 3 pieces. It was probably weakened by exposure to the elements, aggressive sharpening, and being low quality to begin with. The new one is much much better

The boss scoffs and says "give me one good reason that I should give you a raise!" Guy replies "I'll give you 3, because 3 different companies called me just the other day." "Wow, you really had 3 companies contacting you?" "Yeah, the mortgage company, the electric company, and the cable company... You've gotta give me a raise!"

...because the shape of the water bottle isn't uniform either. Part of my new year's resolution is to drink 4 liters of water per day, so I spend a lot of time looking at those lines. Edit: 4 liters is a lot, but appropriate for my size and activity level. Without conscious consideration I don't drink enough water. It looks blue because the bottle is blue.

Picked this bad boy up from a local oddities expo. Aurora quartz is natural quartz that has been bonded with metal vapor in a vacuum chamber to give it an iridescent shine

Top: Penny in 2023. She passed in 2024 at around 10 years old. Bottom: Fiona in 2025. We adopted her this summer, she's about 2 and a half. I grew up with cats, and after having Penny for ~9 years I have trouble picturing life without a cat or two. Funnily enough, my wife wasn't a cat person until I made it clear that Penny and I were a package deal.

I recently moved into a new development dystopian American burboclave. I ran unopposed for head of the home owner association's events committee, and I want to foster an actual community with stuff like game nights, holiday parties, team sports and the like. Right now, the only digital space we have is a WhatsApp (🤮) group chat with like 1/2 the community in it. Going forward, I'd like a feature set like Discord or Slack (polls, roles, channels, voip, moderation, decent mobile & desktop browser experience, etc.) that we can physically host in the community. Nice-to-haves are containerization, backup, migration, and high availability mirroring. Incidentally, I'd love to get ideas on hardware I could host this on. I hear used corporate blade-style servers are good bang for your buck, but I don't know how to begin shopping for one of those.

tl;dr newby friendly SW and HW for self hosting a Discord-esque platform? Apologies if this is a low-effort or a Let Me Google That For You situation; I'm baby

Edit: thank you all very much for your thoughts and advice. I'll research and test the software that was suggested with the knowledge that the site I stand up will likely be used by few or no people.

::: spoiler spoiler White kitty in the tree :::

They got a skeleton mod team creating a right-wing bias, trains AI off the comments. We take 'em out, absorb the whole fuckin' thing. Let me tell you a couple or three things: forget about the boston bomber, forget about RIF, forget about /r/thedonald. /u/spez has no respect for this thing. He's never shitposted, not really. Here's a guy who stepped over digg to grab the big seat. I'm embarrassed. I load up the subreddit to see the kirk memes last week, and I took his bloated fuckin' app in commiseration. They post anything and everything over there. And the way that they do it, it's all fucked up. There's no downvote counter, weird monetization in the flairs. It either has meaning or it has no meaning.