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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • The most common thing I’ve seen are projects where it acts like a screen or control panel on the wall. Something that’s a fixture or art project.

    You don’t need it for anything like music or games - your new phone will be more convenient and run those things better anyway.

    A friend of mine stuck an old tablet on the wall and connected it via Bluetooth to his keg system. It gave him a permanent status readout on his beer temperature and how much was left in each keg. It just had a power cable plugged in all the time so it didn’t need to be charged.



  • My angry knives can bitch all they want. They live in a tiny ass drawer all piled on top of each other. They rarely see the light of day and I personally pay very little mind to their plight.

    The good knives live in an airy, sunlit space on a magnet knife block above my sink. They get lots of fresh air, have plants nearby, and get to be a part of the family. When they are used, they’re always honed and immediately washed and dried and put away. They never mingle with the angry knives.

    An angry knife was once accidentally promoted to the magnet block. It was a mistake that was quickly remedied, and it could have gotten bad.



  • I absolutely adored a low budget game called Firewatch. It’s first person and your only contact with another human is through a radio. You’re running away from your life and work for a summer in a fire watch tower in a national park.

    The story is nice and the characters are interesting and flawed and relatable.

    Buy it on sale and have a fun evening or two with it.


  • It really depends on the context. What was the first encounter? If it was a first date, then yeah, that’s brutal and you suck. If it was a quick intro at a busy event, it’s almost expected.

    There’s a bit of a difference between names and faces. Forgetting a name is like forgetting a piece of trivia, but if you meet and speak to somebody and can’t recognize them in a different context (and they look basically the same), it can send a signal that you didn’t find them memorable (and you didn’t lol).

    The only time in my life when I found it irritating was my best friend’s roommate who, after hanging out with them in small groups dozens of times for hours each time, still kept introducing herself to me on subsequent visits. I could never figure out if it was drugs, a method of humour or flirting I didn’t understand, or she was really that oblivious to other people.



  • There’s a small panel in the ceiling of a small closet in an upstairs bedroom. Open and squeeze through it and I’m in the attic space. Need to use my cell phone flashlight because it’s pitch black up here.

    Walk across the joists to the far end and carefully lift away the insulation between the joists.

    Use my phone and order a bunch of shit from a bunch of apps to be delivered to my house. Turn off the phone in case the agents can track me with it. Carefully lay on the drywall, distributing my weight across as much of the panel as possible to reduce the risk of breaking through into the room below. Cover myself with the insulation I pulled away earlier.

    Now these foreign agents are going to have to find that ceiling panel, climb up in there, search under insulation to find me, wrestle me through that tiny access hole and whisk me away. All the while there are Uber drivers and pizza delivery guys showing up. And that’s all suspicious as fuck, so someone’s going to call the cops before long. If these are foreign agents, they probably don’t want to deal with law enforcement.

    So I figure I need to hide under that insulation for maybe twenty minutes before shit starts getting crazy.


  • This sounds like another version of the “definition of freedom”.

    Is freedom being unrestricted from doing whatever you want? Or is it protection from people doing whatever they want that would otherwise injure you?

    I guess I’d argue that banning slavery in the middle of a culture that embraces it is, in fact, authoritarian. Similarly, enabling slavery in the middle of a culture that rejects it is also authoritarian.

    It gets more interesting when the population is split on what they want policy to be. I think Prohibition is a better comparison since it’s less emotionally charged.

    Was enacting Prohibition authoritarian? Sure seems that way, even though it had a lot of support. Was rolling it back also authoritarian? The people who originally supported it and now see it taken away probably feel it’s authoritarian.

    IMO as long as people are happy to argue with each other about basic definition of words, the answer to the original question is “it doesn’t matter”.