Who else is talking to them?

I’ve driven a pickup truck for 20 years and never once had anything stolen out of it. “Safest big city” as a phrase strikes me similarly to “most comfortable chest wound.”

Mouse. Singular. Cat.

It’s actually funny going back and watching early episodes of The New Yankee Workshop and hearing Norm brag about the “new” glues that were coming available. “This is a one-part glue, you don’t have to mix it up, it’s ready to use in the bottle, it’s water proof and it cleans up with water! I wouldn’t have even tried doing this myself without these modern glues.” They avoided showing brand names and such on the show; Norm was usually careful to hold the glue bottle with the back facing the camera, but he’s clearly holding a bottle of Titebond 2, with it’s blue cap.

And I mean, yeah. imagine building furniture without PVA glue, you change how you think.

I forget why, but Picard and Riker are away, Data is in command with Worf as his first officer. Data wants to be analytical and consider all options, Worf wants to fire all phasers and die in glorious battle. Data comes to a decision and gives orders, and Worf says “Finally!”

Data asks to see him in the ready room, and then dresses him down for talking back to him in front of the crew. They hash out what they expect the role of second in command is supposed to be, and with the military shit out of the way, Data then acknowledges that this dressing down may have damaged their friendship, and Worf replies that no, he was out of line so it was his fault, that he acknowledges that he was out of line and if we can overlook this incident he’d like to continue being friends.

Stated problems, voiced objections, addrressed objections, no personal slights, no raised voices, actual accountability expected and accepted…manliest conversation ever filmed.

I will FEED HIM.

I’m reliably told three times a day that my someteen year old cat has never once had a meal in her life. Not even the one I fed her hours prior.

I don’t know about that. I tried using both ChatGPT and Gemini to brainstorm for ideas for the name and branding of a woodworking Peertube channel. They both struck me as similar yes men with little to no imagination. Both suggested things like “sawdust and smiles.” And they would both, ALWAYS start a response with something like “That’s a great idea!” “That’s a wise approach!” "Your concern is very valid!’ Such brown nose, very kiss ass.

It doesn’t seem to be too useful for this particular use case, either.

My father once told me of an old IBM machine, I think it was the System 3 model 15D or one of its contemporaries, or maybe the original System 38. It had some amount of memory, like 32k of memory (I’m going to get these numbers wrong), and to upgrade it you could spend many thousands of dollars to have IBM come install a control board to upgrade it to 64k. The memory was already physically in the box; they manufactured and delivered it to the customer, and sold the memory control board as an exorbitant cost option, when it was the RAM (it might have even been core storage) that was the expensive part to make.

To a lesser degree, I’ve been hearing about cars that install cost options on all models, but they don’t hook them up on the lower tiers. Like apparently all Lotus Exiges have power mirrors, they’ve all got motors in them, but they don’t give you the switch unless you pay for it. You can go to a Ford dealership, buy the right switch and just pop it in and it’ll work. I suppose it can make some sense to reduce part counts, but it’s getting to the point where it’s "we installed the option in the car, it’s hooked up, it’s perfectly functional, we’ve already put in the expense, and we’ll allow the software to turn it on if you pay for it.

Let me clarify this part of my thinking: That line has moved a lot since the lifetime of Thomas Chippendale.

When you think about what it would take to build an ornately carved mahogany highboy with a high gloss varnish in 1750 versus today, including logging, transporting exotic wood around the planet, the actual woodworking…hell, just compare applying a shellac french polish versus spray lacquer today.

I could run a fairly decent woodworking racket given 10 cubic meters a year. Does that include branches and such?

Ten cubic meters of free wood a year. Huh. That’s an oak or two.

I think my top favorite business card simply said

John Doe

Legitimate Businessman

When it comes to rich people, pretty much yes it is.

On my main desktop I’m using Fedora KDE. Arrived here by process of elimination.

Linux Mint Cinnamon didn’t run particularly well with my hardware, I was looking for a distro with decent Wayland support so I could run my high refresh rate monitor properly. So that pretty much meant a switch to KDE. So who’s implementation of KDE?

I’ve spent much of my time on the Ubuntu side of things, but Canonical has been pulling so much diet Microsoft shit that I’d rather not use any of the *buntus themselves, so Kubuntu is out. Neon? Kubuntu again. I’m not terribly interested in the forks of forks of forks of forks, I’ve been around long enough to go “Remember PeppermintOS? You don’t, okay.” So I’m looking for something fairly near the root of its tree.

I’ve never really seen the appeal of Arch and every time I’ve tried running Manjaro it failed to function, so forget that. I don’t know shit about SuSe, that basically left Fedora. So here I am.

Then you’ve got the Hallmark movie they’ve remade 90,000 times now, where the women are usually some kind of lawyer or executive or something, who travels to a small town likely where she was raised for some contrived reason only to find what she really needs: Some stuffed flannel with designer stubble.

Wait a minute! What tools? You’re supposed to be doing theory! You’re a field psycho-ornithologist, aren’t you?

Yeah, see: when you’re looking at these highly ornate antiques, it’s not the wealth of the craftsman on display; it’s the wealth of his customer.

Are you yourself a craftsman?

I have been rendered incapable of seeing beauty in ostentatious displays of wealth.