WhiningCoil
No bio...
User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
15d ago
It's tough. I haven't been a 4chan regular since the 00's, and back then it was easy to think Digg or Reddit were coming up with memes. But if you were in the know, you knew they came from 4chan first. I haven't been to 4chan in ages, and the last few times I tried I found the UI too painful on the eyes. Which is funny because I don't think it's changed at all, but I guess my expectations of a site have. So that said, I could believe twitter is now the fountainhead of memes... but I could also believe they are all stolen from 4chan and I'm just an ignorant normie now.
WhiningCoil
16d ago
Oh damn, not even a tablesaw huh? I really was completely in the wrong mindset for you. There I go being all American again.
WhiningCoil
16d ago
Yeah, I hear that. I remember getting creative, and finding ways to use my tablesaw as a jointer, and putting rabbets on joints for drawers and boxes with it.
Then I discovered the raw joy of having the correct tool for the correct job. The jointer I got last year has been the best edition to my shop by a mile. No more planing sled or makeshift jointing on the tablesaw for me!
IMHO, a router table might be the second most important powertool behind a tablesaw. It can joint, template, profile, mortise, and probably more. If I had to do it all over again, I'd probably have skipped my miter saw and gotten a router table sooner.
Also my next project is ripping out a bunch of poorly optimized shelving that came with the place, and instead putting in a miter saw station, lots of drawers, and a wall rack for rough lumber. So that'll be fun.
WhiningCoil
16d ago
Next step is deciding how I'll create the chamfer/roundover without owning a router or a plane. I've seen people do it with rasps but I don't want to tear and chip the soft pine, but I'd also like something faster and less dusty than sanding.
Honestly I'd say just nut up and get a router. But if that is ruled out for whatever reasons, like you are attached to hand tools, maybe a card scraper? I keep meaning to grab a few myself.
WhiningCoil
16d ago
My wife keeps bringing that up, but my shop is too large and poorly insulated for that to be practical. There is actually an old wood stove out there I could get going if I ever spent an appreciable amount of time out there during the winter. But I think for my purposes something like this or this might be more useful. Something a bit more on demand and directional, so I'm not pissing the wind trying to heat up an enormous drafty space.
WhiningCoil
16d ago
I don't know when I last said what I was doing, so to recap...
I built a boardgame table last year out of rustic walnut. I calculated it would cost me $300 in lumber, somehow I actually spent $450. Still beats the $2000+ asking price of most places selling them. I spent the summer working on it, burnt the fuck out, and took a break for the fall/winter. But the weather is getting nice again, so my un-climate controlled shop is getting nice again too. I sorted out all the off cuts from my table, and am going to make a set of 4 chairs to go with it. Because right now I have a motley collection of crappy folding chairs and desk chairs pulled from my computers.
I based my design off these plans. Except I made it a little smaller because when I compared it's dimensions to virtually every other chair in my entire house, they were comically huge. I'm also not using home depot lumber, because WTF? Nor am I using pocket screws, and am instead going with 100% mortise and tenon joinery.
I mean christ, I wouldn't trust a pine chair held together with pocket screws... would you?
But first I had to build a new chicken coop, because a fox killed 3/4 of our laying hens, and my wife thought that was a great excuse to buy 20 fucking chicks. Granted, she's apparently promised to give 10 of them away to friends when they mature, but still.
After that I got serious about the chairs again. I took all the random offcuts I had sorted out, and milled them to the proper size. I also had 2 spare planks of walnut I ended up not even needing for the table which became the seats, and a few more random parts. Next up was gluing up the seat panels. I may end up creating a template for these to give them a slightly more interesting flared shape, but we'll see. They may end up just square.
Next up I made the template for the back legs. This was a fairly straight forward process of putting a gentle curve on a blank with a flexible piece of scrap I had lying around. Then making the cuts with a jigsaw and lots of sanding.
I'm loaded for bear on this project because I decided to invite a buddy over this Saturday to work on it with me. Going to head to the lumber yard, pick up the 6/4 stock I need for the legs. I'm hoping 2 planks should do it, but we'll see how many knots I need to work around. Might get a 3rd just to be safe. Then hopefully get a few milled, cut, and maybe even get some chairs dry fit together. Which means I need as much done as possible. I still need to get the tenons cut on all the parts and my router dialed in to cut the mortises in the legs. I may even take a piece of 2x6 or whatever I have lying around and make some test legs just to make sure everything looks good. Then after the day is over, and I can take my sweet ass time sanding, shellacking and waxing all the parts.
It's remarkable how wood working is like, maybe 15% cutting and assembling. The rest is design, milling and finishing. I'm starting to understand how a lot of people just buy S4S boards, and then also have some other professional finish it to boot. If I ran a business and/or had the money I might do that too.
WhiningCoil
17d ago
It does sound like that "immigration attorney" committed fraud by just inputting her own details into other illegal immigrant's "parole status" applications, because it got her "clients" to the next screen. She probably assumed nothing could possibly result from it. She may yet be right. These people never suffer any consequences.
WhiningCoil
19d ago
That's been on my wishlist forever. I liked that studio's previous game, Northgard, and I'm under the impression Dune: Spice Wars plays similarly to that. But I feel like I have more games than life left to play them in my libraries, so I'm trying to do a "I need to beat two games before I buy one" type rule.
WhiningCoil
20d ago
Yeah, I'm pretty sure if NK and SK ever unify, it won't be on SK's political or cultural terms.
WhiningCoil
20d ago
Is anyone more familiar with the cultures willing to confirm or deny my impression that the South Koreans seem to be more willing to embrace automation. Maybe that can help fend of declines in raw GDP for a few more years?
Ah yes, clearly the Korean culture will flourish with the 10 surviving Koreans atop an automated empire as opposed to millions of Koreans experiencing all the richness of the human condition in relative poverty. After all, the first question St Peter asks you is "What was your GDP?"
WhiningCoil
20d ago
Fascinating, and encouraging. I might have to take a harder look at the Brigador games and these novels.
WhiningCoil
20d ago
Wait, Brigador the relatively lofi top down mech game? They have novels? As in plural?
I was not expecting this at all. I knew Brigador had a pretty good reputation during the long dark between Mechwarrior 4 and HBS Battletech came out, and I dabbled in it lightly. I didn't know they were exploring full on multimedia world building in the same vein as Battletech as well.
On a scale of "Sheltered Virgin" to "SF Pride Parade" how pozzed would you say the world building is? Cause that's been a problem with more recent Battletech works since they shitcanned Blaine Lee Pardoe, and Pardoe's new series Land&Sea really lacks the dynamism the world of Battletech brought to the table, though it does have the stompy robot action.
WhiningCoil
21d ago
Sure, I wouldn't care either if I didn't have hundreds of thousands invested in the market, like millions of other people do through various retirement accounts.
Maybe I read too much into it. That just pattern matched to "millions are suffering and I care like a good person should". And I refute both points. Retirement accounts are not lost in a day unless you sell the bottom like a hysterical woman, and we've seen worse event in recent memory, much less living memory.
WhiningCoil
22d ago
Congratulations, you just made the worst argument in the world for the millionth time. "You don't care? That makes you a bad person."
I don't care because I already lived through worse in 08, assorted points during Obama where we nearly "broke the buck", COVID, and most recently at points in 2022 where all the gains of my portfolio were wiped out going back to 2017. These tariff hiccups don't even take my portfolio back to the beginning of 2024.
Also, it's not a loss until you sell. Which if you do, you're a chump. Panic selling the bottom is how they get you.
I don't care about daily stock market swings because they are fucking retarded, and you shouldn't either.
WhiningCoil
22d ago
I mean, I get that, but I don't.
Like, I get that if we're talking about a court case. Diving into the minutia of which legal arguments the Supreme Court will agree with, and which justices will go which way. Less so when it comes to individual court cases, like Rittenhouse, although I understand they are good drama and lightning rods for the culture war. I certain dove all in on some of them.
I get it when it comes to hot conflicts like Ukraine and Russia, and debating tactics, strategy and capabilities. Especially because reality quickly asserts itself.
The tariff discussion though... all I know is that all the same talking heads who've been wrong about everything insist tariff's will destroy the economy. They quote that the last time we did this was 100 years ago, and that simultaneously that's how we know it's a terrible idea, but also that the world has changed so much tariffs won't work like they used to when Trump brags about how great they were 100 years ago.
Fact of the matter is, Trump is a singular figure in history. He doesn't compare to anyone else. As well, these tariffs, coming from him, with the state of the world being what it is, is a singular moment in history that cannot be compared to any other. 10 years from now, some people might rise to the top as "having been right about the Trump tariffs". Some of them might have even done so on purpose! But I would also not be shocked if they lead to outcomes nobody predicts and nobody gets it completely, or even half right. You might as well be arguing about the next number at the craps table.
WhiningCoil
22d ago
I've largely ignore all the tariff talk the last, jeeze, two weeks? Three weeks? It's just repetitive top level posts really adding nothing over and over and over again, everyone so certain they know what's going to happen.
Nobody knows what's going to happen. Did anyone know this would happen? Does anyone know what happens next?
I'm just so tired with everyone's vapid obsession with tariffs. To the point where it feels like a psyop. I've repeated my criteria for the Trump administration, and my hesitancy to rush to judgement too quickly. I'm waiting until the mid terms to see if my life has gotten better, or worse. I don't care about twitter post, I don't care about stock market swings, I do care about inflation, but in the "Has my pay risen faster than my grocery bill" sense and not a "Here's how the federal reserve is lying with statistics" kind of way.
Can we all reflect, for a moment, about all the breath and ink that has been feverishly spilled over this topic the last two weeks, to come to what? Do we even know what this point is supposed to represent? Or what tomorrow's tweets will be?
We've had topic bans before, and honestly I wouldn't be opposed to a month long ban on tariff discussion. Or putting it into it's own thread. Might as well be arguing alternate histories as far as I'm concerned.
WhiningCoil
23d ago
I think your 20 year old memory is better than my 20 year old memory on this one. I was misremembering Warrior Within as Two Thrones.
WhiningCoil
23d ago
Marc Andreessen has been shouting about it from the roof tops.
Why Marc Andreessen was ‘very scared’ after meeting with the Biden administration about AI
He walked away believing they endorsed having the government control AI to the point of being market makers, allowing only a couple of companies who cooperated with the government to thrive. He felt they discouraged his investments in AI. “They actually said flat out to us, ‘don’t do AI startups like, don’t fund AI startups,” he said.
Here is a 41 second clip of him on Joe Rogan taking about it too
WhiningCoil
23d ago
I mean, in addition, to hear a lot of them tell it, The Biden admin basically said to them "We are giving Microsoft and Google an AI monopoly, and we are going to regulate the rest of you out of business. Plan accordingly." So they left the meeting and backed the guy who was not going to literally regulate their significant investments into bankruptcy.
WhiningCoil
23d ago
While the list of books has evolved over the last century, the tradition of all students reading foundational texts of Western civilization remains.
Yeah, it really does just say it right up front. Just another isolated demand for rigor. Not a single reading list can emphasize a pre-Marxist classical view of Western Civilization. Have to isolate them and act like they need to be "more diverse", ignoring all the diversity around them that people get plenty of already.
WhiningCoil
24d ago
It looks interesting, but I refuse to sign up to another fucking site to take their gamer astrology quiz.
Maybe Carmack takes it a bit far, but I think story in gaming is load bearing. At best it lets a game punch above it's weight. Portal minus the writing and world building is rather bland. But by the same token, think about how sparse the "writing" in Portal really is. Do you think it cracks 15 minutes of spoken dialog? Would the scattered bits of text in the game fit on the front and back of a notecard?
From one perspective, Carmack's dismissiveness towards writing and story is proven wrong by Portal. From another perspective, Carmack is vindicated, as Portal truly does have just enough writing to get the action going.
"Just enough to get the action going" is hardly a scientific measure, and one could argue an RPG takes more to "get the action going" than a puzzle game. But I enjoy the laconic inspiration behind the ethos. Nothing kills me worse in a game, even a game I am ostensibly enjoying, even an exposition dump I am ostensibly invested in (like when Xenoblade 3 almost made me cry), than when I get the feeling like this is nice and all, but I kind of want to play too, so can we wrap up this going on 30 minute cutscene?
WhiningCoil
27d ago
Reading game manuals in middle school is such a unique time period. It think it was really only the mid 90's where the manuals had enough heft and fluff to make that an interesting exercise, and also they were still actually printed and shipped with games. I poured over the manuals for Diablo, WarCraft 1 & 2, StarCraft, etc in middleschool. It really built up the anticipation to run home from school off the bus and boot them up again.
WhiningCoil
27d ago
Yeah, I generally carve out an exception for first party Nintendo games. I've adored almost every one I've played in recent years, Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Tears of the Kingdom less so), Mario Odyssey, Xenoblade 1-3, and more that are slipping my mind. I still mean to give Pikmin 4 a go since my wife got it for me for Christmas.
WhiningCoil
27d ago
I increasingly think Carmack was right. Story in games is like story in porn. You need just enough to get the action going. Most of my memorable moments in games come from overcoming challenges, rarely story beats. I rarely want to replay a game with a good story, because it takes so much work to get through it. If I want a story, I'll read a book or watch a movie. Increasingly just read a book these days.
The singular exception to this was ICO, who's environmental story telling was so masterful, which tied it's game mechanics into it so subtly, it blew me away with it's story in a way no other game has since. You were buying into it in ways you didn't even realize just playing the game normally. Raw genius.
Outside of that, I think I just want unpretentious serviceable game plots.
From what I understand, the hack that took down 4chan (a 10 year old security vulnerability in what files they allowed people to upload) was way too stupid to have been a state actor. By which I mean, it would have been effortless for a state actor to have taken 4chan down at any point. There is no reason for them to do it now. So instead I'm more willing to chalk it up to random belligerence.
If details of what the hack revealed are remotely true, it seems like 4chan was co opted by state actors anyways. Lots of moderation and bans nipping at the edges of "noticing". Lots of .gov and .edu addresses on record. There is a sense that there were forces trying to sheep herd 4chan gently closer to The Message.
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