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.
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.”
quietly pushes entire bespoke server rack under bed
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.
Eating all the food you cook will make you fat
Especially if you want to make “good” food. I’m not saying there isn’t good food that is healthy for you. But if you want to make things taste like they do in a high end restaurant, it’s probably going to require a shitload of butter/ghee and salt. And then probably cream. And also highly fatty meats.
It’s usually just butter. So much fucking butter.
And also highly fatty meats. It’s usually just butter. So much fucking butter.
Anthropology: The study of mankind’s quest for readily available fat.
The correct number of guitars to own is n+1, with n being the number of currently owned guitars.
Dice. Definitely dice.
Same for cameras, axes and chainsaws…
Lenses maybe, camera bodies, nah.
And bikes, and computers
And freeway lanes necessary to solve traffic
Warhammer 40K is what some may call…MEGA EXPENSIVE.
I didn’t need to buy a base amount of Legos to create my own designs.
Losing Joann’s has made it really difficult to find fabric locally. Michael’s needs to step their game up.
Move to Chicago, we have good local stores for fabric.
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…
Needlework is hard on rhe hands. I wear compression gloves and wrist braces when cross stitxhing to minimize the impact on my hands. I need to talk to a doctor about my hands but i try to take good care of them even when playing games i wear a brace.
I should have been less willing to buy an electric bass that’s too heavy to me. I got a maple-body Jazz Bass ~10 years ago, back then it was kinda heavy but fine for me, today I’m quite a bit less fit than I was then and no amount of wide, cushioned straps are able to make this a good experience for me nowadays, and since I play lefty it’s a PITA to sell it. Until the shoulder and back pain kick in it does sound and play great, though.
IMO, Ibanez Soundgear has the best ergonomics as far as relatively affordable basses go that aren’t headless - pretty lightweight and yet the opposite of top-heavy. I never liked their sound out of the box, though, and aftermarket pickups that fit the cavities without woodworking are kinda expensive.IIT: lots of wisdom
In tabletop roleplaying games:
- Some game features may sound awesome but aren’t really fun for me.
- For example, “let’s try to model the skills of PCs in a granular way by giving them loads of skills”. This is how The Burning Wheel tries to model character skills. Sorry, Burning Wheel fans! I do like the intention, though. It’s just too much paperwork and cognitive load.
- Another example is “let’s try to model the skills of NPCs in a granular way by giving them long stat-blocks". This is how DnD 5e does it. Sorry, 5e fans! Again, it’s just too much paperwork and cognitive load.
What I learned from this is that games that are fun for me do not try to model the game world at a granular level. Instead, what really matters to me is choosing a game that consistently enables meaningful choice and is ergonomic.
- As to GM technique, forget about planning plots and buying gimmicks. Instead, get good at creating interesting scenarios and making rulings. I learned this by reading The Alexandrian’s book on GMing.
- Some game features may sound awesome but aren’t really fun for me.
For digital photography, the only thing I wish I really knew was how to clean the sensor sooner. I made a decent choice with the tech stack for the camera.
You get a much wider margin of error brewing 5 gallons in a bucket instead of starting with 1 gallon as a trial.
When I first made mead I just did a 1 gallon batch to see how it worked but that doesn’t really leave you with enough of a must to do proper gravity measurements without losing half your yield.
Hydroponics, how heavy a 10 gallon tote is filled with water. With about 8 gallons of water in it, it’s about 67 lbs. Thankfully I don’t need to move my basic deep water culture setup and it’s stable. It’s been a great learning experience, but moving forward if I expand I’m going with the nutrient film technique.
A box of comics isn’t going to take up too much space.
Boxes of comics have taken over an entire room.
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.
