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Hi TFF pals, welcome to 2024. I predict another hell year, with bad and good things all mixed in, the specter of another election, endless wars and death, corporate malfeasance and public idiocy. However, we have one another, and football, and various other comforts great and small, and these shall tide us over. Godspeed.
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Jan 1, 2024 23:43
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My condolences, Nervous. I wish I still had a grandma. Hug your grandmas.
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Jan 1, 2024 23:46
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Bird in a Blender posted:I think 3/4 of my posts get ignored. I’ve come to terms with not being funny on the internet. I’m usually funnier in real life. I read and cherish every one of your posts, Bird. I'm nearly 49, no kids, we kind of talked about "hey it's too late now right" a year ago just as our final check-in that we did all along of "still don't want kids, right?" I never got snipped so it was always an option if we changed our minds, and it feels very strange having sort of slid past that fuzzy deadline now, and with my mom's passing I've got those thoughts like, who is gonna take care of us when we're old, when we go is anyone going to remember us, sorta thing. I wouldn't call it regrets, but I spend some time thinking about alternative lives I might have led. What if I'd pursued my interest in archaeology instead of being a technical writer? What if we'd bought a different house instead of this one 14 years ago? What if I'd pushed myself to write fiction? But in the new year I think a new years' resolution for me is to focus on the future more, and less on the past. There's no kids, ok, that's the decision we made in our 20s and 30s and now we live with that and do whatever we want to do this year. I think we might take a trip to go visit our friends in Sweden.
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Jan 2, 2024 17:27
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It helps a bit that my older sister had two kids. I love my niece and nephew, but they're both special needs autism kids and I have no illusions that they're going to be capable of taking care of their aunt and uncle when we're old - hell, we may well still be helping to take care of them, the one that is 20 is showing zero signs of adapting to such adult challenges as "get your first job" or "do anything besides video games" and my sister's not got the will to push him harder. The younger one wants to be a programmer lately, but she's 17 and when I tried to answer a question about what tablet she should get that will let her do art directly on the tablet she was frustrated and confused by the concept of there being different operating systems, so the self-study aspect of learning tech doesn't seem to be strong there either. And she's trans, so that's another life challenge to deal with. I have three other siblings and none show any signs of maybe having kids eventually. My sister in seattle had a hysterectomy, she's poly and she has a long, long history of having terrible partners. My brother is married to an older woman and he is in his early 40s now, they might have a year or two left to try and have kids but they haven't said they're gonna. My other sister is trans and talking about getting her bottom surgery this year, maybe she'd eventually have a kid with a partner but imagine that kid having like five aunts and uncles to try and take care of when they're old? Anyway the long and the short of it is, none of us in my family can expect young people to be supporting us. We'll have to try and support one another, and I guess save enough money to hire people. Make lots of friends. I like to joke that by the time we're that old we'll have household robots to do things for us. We used to think that the robots would evolve to kill all humans, but now looking at the track record of AI cars, I think they'll be more likely to accidentally wreck the kitchen because their sensors can't see your new cookware, and then blithely run out into traffic and get creamed by a tesla truck.
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Jan 2, 2024 17:49
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seiferguy posted:36 going on 37. Got married last year, finally. One of my biggest issues is that I've been agreeing to doing a lot of things that felt fine at the time, but upon doing them I'm really not happy with - like I thought buying a house was a good idea but I miss living in Seattle and realize I don't need a lot of space for things, or that doing a Catholic wedding would be nbd then going into it being a pretty big revelation about how much I hate the Catholic Church. One thing I haven't done is had kids, but my wife wants them. I had agreed shortly after we got engaged, but recently told her that I need more time to get my poo poo together. I'm not trying to butt into your marriage or anything, but you should keep in mind that if your wife is already in her mid to late 30s, every year you ask her to wait to get pregnant increases the medical risks she faces from pregnancy. It's a big big ask. But if you don't want kids at all I think you should tell her that so she can decide what to do. Scary conversation.
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Jan 2, 2024 18:58
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Yeah. Well, I'll tell you one more thing that my wife and I always kept in mind, especially once we hit 40 with no kids, and that's that adoption is still an option later. Especially if you don't need to adopt an infant, adopting an older kid is a kind thing to do with no medical risks for mom.
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Jan 2, 2024 19:14
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seiferguy posted:I've been wanting to get a catio for my little guy since he does like going out (if he lets me put his harness on), but immediately wants to bite and eat all the grass / other plants which is a big no no considering he has IBS and would easily upset his stomach. Your cat instinctively wants some fiber. You can potentially help the cat by adding fiber to their diet via a little psyllium powder (it's basically metamucil, but get pure psyllium so there's no additives) plus a little extra water, to their wet food daily. Of course ask your vet first. But it really helped our cat who had gut issues.
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Jan 2, 2024 21:40
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Back when streaming services didn't exist yet, my wife and I watched all of Battlestar galactica together until one day halfway through the last season she watched the next episode without me while I was working late and then accidentally deleted it from the DVR. There were no scheduled replays, period, no way to watch it for at a minimum some months. She watched the rest of the season without me and I still to this day have never seen the end. Like last four episodes or so. Lol I was so mad
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Jan 3, 2024 17:54
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I dunno if Caro "deserves" $50m, but nobody deserves to be stuck in a Syrian torture prison for a year or two, even a dumbass with low-grade schizophrenia who inserts himself into war zones. The US flexing on Syria with this judgement is a big whatever, Assad is an evil monster so I don't care.
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Jan 4, 2024 18:36
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Tomlin's career record is .622 with ten playoff visits in 17 years, so he's a winning coach and anyone who is mad about having Tomlin as their coach should consider the majority of the alternatives: losing coaches. That said, maybe it's time for a change for them, because things can get stagnant after 17 goddamn years, holy poo poo.
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Jan 5, 2024 01:10
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Kalli posted:.... Fine I'll submit the bugfix I assume you've probably seen this essay at some point but just in case you haven't, or want the link to pass around: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
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Jan 6, 2024 01:16
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dark chocolate peanut butter cups from trader joes are better than regular reeses
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Jan 12, 2024 00:10
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i've only gotten the big tub so I did not know that but it validates my gluttony so I'll happily repeat it
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Jan 12, 2024 00:17
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In July 2016my wife and I drove out to Wisconsin so she could go to a residency (at the Kohler factory in Sheboygan, which is very weird and cool) and we stopped at Badlands in South Dakota for most of a day. I took a bunch of pics. It is a spectacular place to visit. We only went to the scenic overlooks and pull outs and easy pathways, didn't do any real hiking because we didn't have time, so everything below is from very family-friendly spots. I think we got pretty lucky with the wildlife.         
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Jan 12, 2024 19:13
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That bird with the grasshopper on the stop sign was super pleased with itself. That was at a parking lot off the road, it was just up there in the wind looking around like "hey everyone look at this poo poo. Biiig juicy bug. I got it. Not gonna eat it yet. Just look. Marvel at my birdy hunty prowess."
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Jan 12, 2024 19:26
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a sexual elk posted:Size comparison You are not cleaving a cord of that with an axe, not if you had all winter. You'd need to hold down every piece to keep it from jumping around, the irregular surfaces will be a huge pain in the rear end, and a cord of wood is a lot. It's a chainsaw, or not at all, friend. I mean hell I'd give it a go on the bandsaw but it'd still be a bitch and a half. I wouldn't want to cut it all with a chainsaw either. If I were in your situation I'd be looking for someone who needs a cord of wood, and someone else who has a cord of wood that is cut eight inches shorter.
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Jan 17, 2024 20:00
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yeah if you're using like one or two bits a day that's manageable, a cord is like... a few hundred of them
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Jan 17, 2024 20:11
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I work at a giant software company. I've no doubt there's software engineers making $200k+ if they've put a decade or more into the job, but most of the people who make that are well into a management role, like middle management and up. This is at a big established company though. There's a faster path to wealth which is to work at startups, of course you could get unlucky and do three or four busts and never have one that makes it big, but if you're young and can handle the grinding hours and irritatingly big personalities and all that poo poo, it's a possibility that you'll get on board a pre-IPO that gets big VC money and your options and stuff will push your income up and over the 200k mark. As a technical writer, lol, lmao at that being an option, nobody in my field makes 200k. I've got 24 years into my career now and my little brother is making the same as me after three years of doing Elixir programming. Technically I make a bit more because I have RSUs that push it above, but on a strict salary basis his is higher than mine. "IT" is kind of an eroded term now. It used to mean the guys handling all the servers and networking at every company that had those, but increasingly everything's cloud and your random insurance office or lawyer firm's IT dept has shrunk and the work has become more straightforward and I think that has depressed the salaries. But then there's jobs working at like an amazon data center or implementing a complicated cloud architecture at some big company that can pay pretty well. I'm not sure if people would call those "IT" jobs specifically, they tend to be more specialized. System integrator, pre-sales architect, etc. You get like an Azure certification or something and then charge consultant fees to companies to help them implement their MS cloud deployment and maybe that's "IT" but nobody's calling it that. The reality is that, as in many other fields, specialization is how you make more money, but also involves a certain amount of added risk. If you're the only guy in the region who really knows how to do this one specific thing, you can charge high fees. But if that one specific thing becomes obsolete and you don't have more general skills, you could just stop being relevant. I remember in the 90s/00s there were people with loads of investment into physical networking knowledge and technologies, and then basically everything standardized on ethernet. If you invested a ton of time into expertise with token ring networking, that investment became worthless and you needed to be willing and able to shift to the modern thing. And since the modern thing is much more standardized, you'll be competing with a lot of other networking people who are also experts with ethernet networks. Your specialization premium went away. I'm somewhat specialized on cloud architecture docs. But that's a shift. I used to be somewhat specialized on enterprise application admin docs. And before that, in ~1999-2000, I had experience with XML before most tech writers did, and that got me my first job. In a world where people are worried about AI eroding writer jobs and we've had two decades of exporting those jobs overseas too, I'm still pretty secure because of my specialty. For IT jobs it's a similar deal.
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Jan 18, 2024 19:03
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Thaddius the Large posted:My ex wife did the startup routine for a bit but had pretty bad luck, ranging from unexpectedly shutting down with no notice to the cokehead owner firing her at SEATAC during a manic episode while she was returning from a work trip. Made me greatly appreciate the stability of government work, the best job security and especially with the union I’m harder to get rid of than a cockroach. My pay is unimpressive in the grand scheme but for a social worker, especially one without an MSW, it’s pretty much top of the industry, I’ve got a buddy who wants to move to Tennessee to be near her family and it’d literally be a 60% pay cut Yup. I dunno if this holds true across all industries but for a lot of white collar jobs, you can take a ~$80k-$120k job and more or less half-rear end it permanently with no big trouble. But if you want to make $200k you are going to be busting your rear end. Maybe there's some dead easy $200k jobs out there but I don't know what they are. If you're thinking "executives" hell yeah but at least in my industry they're making more than $200k and a lot of them sacrificed their personal lives for 10-20 years first to get there. If you are climbing a management chain, the bottom levels of management suck rear end a lot in a lot of industries. I know a fair number of programmers and while I don't know all of their salaries, I know the ones that have gotten promotions and longevity in their jobs and have have roles like "chief architect" are the types that hammer out code for weeks without coming up for air and don't seem to have a lot of outside of work hobbies or interests. That's never gonna be me.
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Jan 18, 2024 20:51
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oh yeah I forgot there is one obvious line of work where you can make 200k and still be a lazy rear end in a top hat, and that's cops lol just do all the overtime gigs, so I guess you're lazy but also doing a lot of extra hours? it's the one area where government work seems to pay off more than private sector
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Jan 18, 2024 21:00
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Excuse me for jumping in, Fiz is the clinician, but I did some research on this for my sister a year or so ago and have a couple bookmarks, so I'll chime in. The properly run ones are referral only for serious issues, and the FDA approved version esketamine approved in 2019 or so requires administration under supervision in a certified clinic or hospital type setting. My sister had a couple of assisted ketamine treatments in a clinic as an approach to her crippling depression, and she reported good results but it did not seem to have had the desired long-term effect and she cannot afford to keep trying it. However there have been multiple media reports about irresponsible treatment, with poor or no monitoring and without proper referrals, which can trigger severe or long-term side-effects. Very publically, Matthew Perry's cause of death was ketamine overdose. However, a fairly recent study that reviewed a total of 312 overdose cases and 138 deaths found that "No cases of overdose or death related to the use of ketamine as an antidepressant in a therapeutic setting were found;" as a rule, even in the shadier cases reported in the media, the dosages seem to have been controlled well enough that nobody died. That might seem like a low bar to clear, but there are other therapies for clinical depression that definitely have caused deaths via suicides, including a lot of prescription antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/ketamine-for-treatment-resistant-depression-when-and-where-is-it-safe-202208092797 Since 2019 a ton of clinics have popped up, they're mostly for-profit, some medical insurance programs have started to cover therapies but I think the large majority of patients are paying out of pocket, and the staff at the clinics while they have to be a real doctor have a very obvious motivation to make prescriptions for whoever walks in the door. I'm not sure if we're quite at the level of "you technically need a prescription for viagra or medical marijuana, but lol" but it's not too far off from there either, and I don't think the above study I linked is recent enough to see what the state of affairs are right now this year. So it's worrying. Somebody fucked around with this message at 11:53 on Jan 19, 2024 |
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Jan 19, 2024 07:47
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Kalli posted:Amica has good customer service and isn't terribly expensive if you've got a clean record. 2nding Amica. They've done right by me multiple times for claims, including a total loss. They consistently score at or near the top in customer satisfaction surveys. I think shopping for auto insurance purely on price is a mistake, unless you absolutely cannot afford a couple hundred more a year or something. Look at surveys that include customers who have made claims. JD Power does one, there's probably others like Consumer Reports? Salvor_Hardin posted:Forget up, strike the earth! hell yeah
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Jan 19, 2024 19:00
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3 DONG HORSE posted:So I did an experiment and went off my Vraylar for 2 weeks just to see how I would handle myself. I felt good and more active, like I wasn't being subdued mentally (also I ate less). But I noticed I was also more prone to spending and mood switches but nothing extreme happened thankfully. I'm scared to bring this up with my shrink (though I know I should) because she'll probably get mad at me, but I feel like this is a sign I need to rejigger my dose or supplement my meds somehow. I don't know. Bipolar is weird. I might have just been in a good mood by default and just got lucky nothing bad happened in my life to spiral me. gently caress. It's hard to explain but I feel like the Vraylar, as useful as it seems to be at stopping manic episodes, leaves a slightly gray shade over my life. I'm not your shrink but every family member I've had who has had therapy has used "they will be mad at me" as an excuse to not tell their shrink something and it is always, always excuse-making and not a legitimate reason. If you're literally scared of your shrink being mad because they actually get mad at you, you need a new shrink. You should not be doing or not doing things based on your shrink's feelings or moods. They're there to help you. They can't help you if you're not honest with them. Being honest about the things you did is the only way you can get good advice. You must trust your shrink well enough to be honest so you can get good advice. e. just as in this example, for example, what your psych needs to know is "the side effects of this med isn't tolerable for me" because you're acknowledging right here that the meds are effective at controlling your manic episodes but the ongoing feeling you have when on them is unpleasant or distressing enough to make you want to stop. Your psych can only help you find a med that works for you both in terms of symptoms and in terms of side-effects, if you're honest that you stopped the med and why. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Jan 19, 2024 |
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Jan 19, 2024 21:11
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Yeah that's tough and working out with a new psych is a process, not easy, and I totally get that it's hard to just spill the beans with someone who is basically a stranger. And navigating the insurance thing sucks massively. You have my sympathy for sure. Just try to remember that no matter what response your doctor might have emotionally to your information, if you hide things or aren't honest then the doctor just doesn't have the information they need to be helpful to you and that's more important than whether they'll be mad or disappointed or whatever.
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Jan 19, 2024 21:17
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Running ethernet around your house is not too hard, provided you're willing to learn how to terminate the cable (that is, put a plug on the end). If you're not, and you want to run pre-cut lengths with plugs on them, you have to make bigger holes and it's a lot harder to fish them around corners in conduit etc. Still do-able but if you're handy, I recommend getting a decent termination tool, a spool of a couple hundred feet of cat6, and watch a few videos on how to do it. You can even install a jack in the wall and wire the cat6 directly to that jack, giving you plug-in internet in whatever rooms you want. If you want to run to multiple places from your modem, you may need a switch or router. If you're just running to a single wifi access point, you don't. I recommend buying your own internet modem rather than renting one from your provider - get the list of which are compatible, and then ask the goons in SH/SC which is best and get that one, for best reliability and you don't have to deal with your provider pushing updates or sending you some cheap crap that you then pay $8.99 a month for for the next five years.
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Jan 19, 2024 22:06
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Bird in a Blender posted:I could never get it nice and flat all the way across, but I got it good enough for a cutting board. Great job on the cutting board. And yes, making it flat in all directions using hand planes is A Skill. I've made two now and I'm proud to say that they do sit flat on both sides, BUT that involved literally like ten hours of loving planing. Each. It was suuuuch a pain in the rear end. I made a much bigger rectangle flat this year though so it was worth it to figure the gently caress out "how to make flat using handplanes" which just did not sink in from solely watching youtubes, I had to actually do it, repeatedly.  Picture frames are good projects although another struggle is getting perfect mitered corners. My first frame had small gaps, not big enough for other people to notice really, but I saw them.  e. it probably wasn't really 10 hours, but it felt like it. I'd get frustrated and walk away and come back to work on in the next evening. Having christmas as a deadline in both cases is the only reason I got them done. I'm not making another without an actual planer, I think. I love working with handplanes but I don't have a big perfectly flat surface other than my table saw top, which isn't ideal for doing this work on. I also don't have the right setup like a workbench with an end vise. So it's a lot of loving around with F clamps and trying to plane around them. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Jan 24, 2024 |
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Jan 24, 2024 21:37
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Hey thanks! Yeah I do actually have a belt sander, the benchtop kind, and I struggle with it because it has a platen behind the sandpaper but the belt itself doesn't perfectly lay flat, so you will round corners a little as you press into it. I may just need to fiddle with it more. It was inexpensive, and poor fitment is just sorta part of the territory. I may have to make a custom platen thing myself. The cutting boards were gifts, one for my stepdad and one for my wife's dad, and part of my problem now is I feel bad I haven't made gifts for a bunch of other close family members yet. But I don't want to make more of those. They came out great, but were way more work than I expected. If I had a big drum sander or planer with a wide enough working area they'd have been trivial, and all the ones you see people selling at farmers markets and the like have been made with a drum sander. But the work of learning to edge glue boards together and then make them flat using only hand tools does pay dividends. I'm far more confident with my number 7 and number 8 now than I used to be. They're not just for edge jointing! And I'm determined to fix up my old wooden jack plane because it's so much lighter than my metal #5 or 6. Just another project but I really do like fixing up old hand tools. I am working in my garage and I have a big 4x4 welding table my stepdad and I made that was "good enough" for welding, but the top is not flat and it's too low for woodworking. But if I want a proper woodworkers/joiner's bench I am gonna need to do something with this table because it's the only space available. Maybe outside on the patio but that means getting the patio roof fixed so it stops leaking. Which we gotta do anyway. But this is just one example of how my hobby projects get backlogged by my house projects and then a decade has gone by and I still don't have the workshop setup I want. So maybe I need to just say gently caress it and get that table out even if it's gonna get ruined by water.
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Jan 24, 2024 21:56
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if it's any consolation, Timby, oak is not ideal for cutting boards, it has an open pore structure. I mean it's very pretty, but bird has properly used something like cherry or maple (with the chatoyancy I am leaning maple) along with walnut accents there. I know money is super tight for you now but when you are back on your feet and can afford one, you can get a nice side or endgrain board made of maple or similar and it'll last you a lifetime.
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Jan 24, 2024 21:59
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It really does. And boards warp. No matter what you do, if you cut a board it's going to move at least a little. So even the pros have to run their poo poo through a planer after doing a glueup unless they do some extra poo poo to force them inline, such as a breadboard construction or using dominos or poo poo like that. BTW you guys are gamers, I have noticed in recent games that they're starting to include authentic old-timey woodworking stuff. In Witcher 3 there's a guy in one of the little towns who is using a wood plane to plane a plank, and in baldurs gate 3 I keep finding a "table" that is actually a joiner's bench with a bunch of square holes on top for holdfasts. Makes me feel good to see that attention to detail.
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Jan 24, 2024 23:14
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Bird in a Blender posted:I decided to play some CIV 3 again just for fun and I forgot how annoying the early game is. The computer players just load up on military units and come after you. Pretty much have to spend all your time building up your military otherwise you get run over by a stack of 50 archers. I bounced off Civs 4 and 5 because of the new one-unit-per-hex play mechanic, which didn't really feel good for me. But the earlier pattern was perfected in Civ IV, which is just a much, much better game than III. You still can have some insane leaders (loving Ghandi lol) but the mechanics are more reasonable, the features are more polished, and it's stood the test of time. I used to absorb all the info on CivFanatics and play at a pretty high level - like, I could defeat the game on its second-to-hardest setting, I forget what it's called. The first few turns are still critical, knowing exactly what you need to do for the tiles you have next to your city, etc. to get a great start, but even if you aren't playing like that, you can do OK and there's victory conditions that don't require you to stomp your neighbors. Anyway that site is a fantastic resource for every edition of Civ, if you like to do homework to get better at your leisure activities. https://www.civfanatics.com/
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Jan 25, 2024 18:36
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I've had guac that was like, separating, with watery stuff coming out of it, yuck or totally unsalted, which was easily fixed but also baffling, at least add lime but yeah good guacamole is not hard to make and it's sooo good sure are a lot of finicky eaters in TFF really
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Jan 25, 2024 22:56
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A second trump presidency validates openly attempting a coup, and could be the last time we elect anyone for anything. I'm sufficiently convinced that that's a nonzero risk with Trump (like, maybe not a "high likelihood" but I actually think it's on the table, if you'd asked me six years ago I'd have said lol no way) that it's Biden 100%. I genuinely don't care that Biden's brain is melting, because as toxic and ineffectual and lame and even genocide-supporting as the democratic party is, it's not actively attempting to turn american democracy into russian-style strong man eternal "elected" dictatorship. I've never been a member of the democratic party and I'll vote for someone else in the primary (I just sent in my "please let me vote in the dem primary this year even though I'm not a registered dem" card) but biden will be the nominee and I'll vote for him and encourage everyone else to as well. It's less of a vote for biden or even a vote against trump, and more of a vote for getting to keep voting in the future. e. inflation is in fact falling and has been for months though, including on food and rent and transportation. That doesn't mean rent prices are going down, but the "inflation is out of control" line is republican party "keep saying it so people believe it" fabrication that flies in the face of the actual economic data. this is the right thread to follow for actual economic news with no tweets allowed, and not in a politics forum. It's as close to real a data-driven information channel about the economy as I've found and more people should participate. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Jan 26, 2024 |
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Jan 26, 2024 21:38
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wandler20 posted:Is there any chance Biden could or would pick a different VP? the democratic party doesn't do that they insist on putting in the years and climbing the ladder as a loyal party member, harris is the vp and so she's the next presidential candidate, if the insiders chose differently that would be a betrayal of custom and is also why we had a hillary clinton candidacy before, and why biden was the candidate last time, he'd been a vice president going against the internal rules gets you quietly blacklisted by the party apparatus, bernie's not played by the dem party rules (being an independent) and hillary did so hillary had to be the candidate, see? one of the reasons biden won the last primary was because black voters in southern states overwhelmingly preferred him, and I haven't seen polls but I wonder if that's still the case it's important to remember that old people are still the most reliable voters, so "biden's too old" still doesn't fly with the people who always show up to the polls, and "let's get someone young that appeals to the kids" is still an incredibly risky strategy Anyway we're maybe gonna elect a soon-to-be convicted felon and witness the end of democracy and it'll be because biden is utterly uninspiring, not because of specific policies about israel or the border or student loans or environment or red sea shipping or even the economy. IMO there's one possible exception which is abortion and if the dems really hammer on abortion throughout october, maybe they have a chance becuase despite everything, the actual majority including in the swing states want abortion rights. One thing we really ought to have learned by now is that most policy positions mostly only matter to the people who were gonna vote their party line anyway, the election for president is actually won or lost by inspiring extremely low-information swing voters - a tiny minority - in specific swing states, to show up and vote. Trump inspires powerful emotions in both directions and Biden doesn't. IMO Biden won in 2020 because of votes against Trump in the swing states outweighing votes for him, and that'll be the determining factor again, just how inspired the "stop trump" vs. "let's have him back" arguments sway those weird 1-2% of voters in places like Wisconsin.
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Jan 26, 2024 22:10
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C-Euro posted:Almost no one besides economists cares about the data on this, if the economy feels bad to the person experiencing it then that person will say that it's bad. Not saying the data are wrong but we're firmly in the era of Feels-Based Politics, so data take a backseat to the lived experiences of voters. I tend to agree except I think people here are also responding to how the economy feels to influential twitterverse people and the star posters in c-spam. But the reality is that, even accounting for the deep flaws in how we count unemployment, we're doing really good in terms of employment, real wages are rising faster than inflation the last three months, new housing starts are looking better, and as the fed starts flattening and then lowering interest rates this year a lot of people are going to start getting some relief on their loan rates. Consumer spending this holiday season strongly suggests that actually a large majority of Americans are feeling OK about their finances. You get a very skewed view of what "everyone" is thinking about the economy if you restrict yourself to most of the economic news threads on SA, or just to the poo poo that runs across the twitter feed, or even just look at the headlines on major news outlets.
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Jan 26, 2024 22:14
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kiimo posted:He's going to find a way of delaying that money actually going over until he's dead I bet he'll literally just not pay it and dare someone to make him. What are they going to do, garnish his wages? He's gonna force the government to seize property, because it's to his political advantage to be able to yell about that to his base. RG3POLTICS posted:Yeah I spent another ten dollars on this poo poo.. Again.. I never raped anyone. But yeah internet false accusations... if I was falsely called a rapist and kicked off a website, one thing I definitely would not do is hang around reading that website for years, nor would I be giving money to the guy who runs that website in order to make a few posts for an hour or two until my new account got banned like hanging around here post-permaban is not healthy at all and it reinforces the idea that you have problems respecting boundaries, you know I 100% mean this with all sincerity, please go find some people to hang out with who haven't definitively rejected you with a completely unambiguous "go away and don't come back" message, it'll be a better way to live I promise.
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Jan 26, 2024 23:04
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LeeMajors posted:So I disagree with a few things here. I consider myself a hopeless leftist in a deep red shithole with literally no one to vote for. I consume lots of media outside of my bubble because i have to seek it out. I’ve never heard any actual lefty repeat the Donald the Dove poo poo except that weird dolt Jimmy Dore. I’ve seen it get some traction from Greenwald, but I wouldn’t consider that a leftist source. At most I’d say lefties are bemoaning the absolute antipathy Biden seems to show Palestinians, and the glee with which he seems to fling missiles at Houthis and throw tens of billions at Ukraine (particularly when we “can’t afford” social spending Congress under trump wrote the legislation that had built-in loan forgiveness for the PPP loans, and the idea of clawing some of that money back is swell but in practice it's likely impossible both legally and logistically... at best it'd take congressional action to fund and push for some kind of audit, that's not a thing a president can do and it's silly to demand it of him. Oversight of qualifying for the loans was poor in part because so much money had to be given out so fast. It's probably up to states to do a lot of that work. Biden attempted to forgive student loans in direct defiance of what congressional leaders told him he was allowed to do, and ultimately he was overruled by the court, which is how the government is supposed to function, we do not in fact actually benefit from giving presidents the kind of power you are trying to argue he has, even if it would be in service of a good cause this time. Do you want trump in 2025 to wave his hand and forgive every business loan the government's made, or perhaps to declare all student loans fraudulent and take back all the money lent to students? I feel like this is a really bad idea and it's good actually that the president hasn't got that kind of power, even if we think the good guys (lol) would always use it for good. A president unilaterally breaking the rules of a loan program created by congress was, actually, never in the cards, and the mistake Biden made was to promise it in the first place. I think it's way better to hammer presidents on what they actually have the power to do and fail to, like direct the dept. of homeland security to stop caging immigrant children, or stop selling weapons to the israeli apartheid state as it attempts an ethnic cleansing, rather than invent or demand powers they don't actually have like overrule congress and the courts on student loans or try to take back money that was given away as a covid stimulus law, however badly written and full of loopholes that law was (trump should have vetoed it, there's your presidential power).
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Jan 26, 2024 23:32
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Yes, that's dems, not biden specifically and I'm also real pissed that they decided not to kill the filibuster, let manchin and sinema have his way with the party for two years, and it's totally legit to criticize what biden did during the bush presidency going along with making student loans unforgivable... but we knew he did that when we elected him
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Jan 26, 2024 23:45
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At least one part of the messaging issue is that the dems are saving campaign funds for the general election but the republicans are having an actual primary, so there's been far more money spent from their side already on things like messaging. And the reason the democratic establishment isn't intentionally promoting another candidate is because that'd be massively disloyal, and loyalty to the president you have right now is vital to people who have been entrenched in the party system for decades. They also care the most about beating trump but the nightmare scenario would be trying to beat trump with a candidate they spent time during the primaries trying to tear down. In other words if they wanted biden to not be the candidate they needed to convince him not to run, last year or ideally two years ago, so they could identify their preferred candidate and get that person clearly positioned and ready to go by now. It's far too late. So now they have to pretend like they're not aware they're running a guy who is in mental decline for president.
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Jan 27, 2024 00:49
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Bird in a Blender posted:poo poo like this is amazing. Both sides seeing each other in exactly the same ways, so one of these groups has to be living in a fantasy world yet neither will acknowledge it. I definitely realize the right doesn't march in lockstep, especially after seeing the house republicans tear themselves apart at every opportunity, but I do feel they have a much much better media presence than the left does. I know why the right thinks the left has this huge media bias (reality as a left-wing bias as the saying goes), but drat they must really suck at judging the power of Fox News, OANN, and a thousand morons on youtube. Part of the deal is that the republicans are genuinely in a minority. They're a minority rule party who only has power because of our bizarre electoral system. By population they're like a third of the country. So their view that they're underdogs against an overwhelming tide of "people ruining the country" is correct, except for you know the whole notion that respecting people's identity and bodily autonomy, trying not to roast the planet, being humane toward immigrants, and taxing the rich would ruin the country.
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Jan 29, 2024 18:03
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Yeah like it's been years since I stopped going to facebook but I remember my sister's mother in law, a mild conservative catholic lady who is very nice but kinda dumb, posting worries about sharia law taking over in the US, a country with like 0.5% muslim population
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Jan 29, 2024 19:21
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