That my knees were going to go to shit, and carrying a backpack through the mountains needs good knees. Fuck, I miss those trips.
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.
About me when it comes to all of my hobbies: I like to collect things.
It eats too much time (and money).
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.
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.
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”.
“It’s made outta offcuts.”
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 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.
shia_labeouf_slowclap.gif
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.
This is why I only use languages and libraries that are “finished.” C, Pascal, Euphoria to name a few.
Yep. Redesign the entire library every few weeks because you discovered a better architecture.
Absolutely isn’t true though, unless you only learned JavaScript for some reason and god help you if that is what you call programming
Eating all the food you cook will make you fat
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.
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
Cats
And freeway lanes necessary to solve traffic
Civil engineering as a hobby, eh?
Tactical urbanism ftw!
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)
That those forensics chaps can find the tiniest spatters of blood on your clothes, on your skin, and inyour hair. And people make a lot of spatter.
Ah, a fellow taxidermist! Pleased to meet you
Warhammer 40K is what some may call…MEGA EXPENSIVE.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
Climbing is fun but climbing outdoors requires mountains. Getting to mountains requires a car, or at least people willing to drive you.
