WhiningCoil's profile

WhiningCoil Ghost of Quokka's Future 2hr ago

When last I left you I had the cases made for my bookshelves out of birch plywood.

It's been a hectic two weeks, but I managed to mill the soft maple for the faces. A two, a three, four. Also drilled all the holes for the adjustable shelf pins. Using a jig and getting those done was the most economical method over trying to install six foot rails. I couldn't find a local supplier for them, and having them shipped incured freight charges on account of their size. Plus this saves me having to route out channels for them.

I am noticing more that almost none of the pieces I cut are perfectly square. Not massively so, and you really can't tell. There is maybe a 16th an inch of wobble that some shims will take out. The floor of my basement isn't exactly perfectly flat either. But in the future, if I ever redo the cabinets in my kitchen, I think I need to invest in a tracksaw to break down the sheet goods. Also the pocket screws, despite copious clamping and jigs, still walked on me when I drilled them in, pulling the whole box slightly out of square. Once again, maybe a 32nd of an inch, but it's every joint, and those errors compound. I think in the future I'm just going to suck it up and route rabbet joints. Should invest in some route bits that are perfectly sized for plywood thicknesses.

I did a test stain of the black, and I think I hate it. Tried out a black walnut stain I have, and I like the warmness of the brown tones a lot more. Think I'm going to go with that instead. Probably also worth doing a prestain treatment because the plywood was a pretty blotchy. Probably from the manufacturing process. I swear you can see where the rollers didn't apply preasure evenly across the sheet how the stain absorbs. I also got my last sheet of plywood mostly broken down into the widths I'll need for the shelves. The side cases get 4 shelves each, the top middle gets 2 and the bottom center gets 1.

The next week I aim to get sanding done, headers and footers, and if I'm lucky all the shelves and trim pieces. I doubt I will be lucky.

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WhiningCoil Ghost of Quokka's Future 3hr ago

Did cloudflare take down the weekly tinker threads too?

Maybe I'll move this if it ever shows up.

When last I left you I had the cases made for my bookshelves out of birch plywood.

It's been a hectic two weeks, but I managed to mill the soft maple for the faces. A two, a three, four. Also drilled all the holes for the adjustable shelf pins. Using a jig and getting those done was the most economical method over trying to install six foot rails. I couldn't find a local supplier for them, and having them shipped incured freight charges on account of their size. Plus this saves me having to route out channels for them.

I am noticing more that almost none of the pieces I cut are perfectly square. Not massively so, and you really can't tell. There is maybe a 16th an inch of wobble that some shims will take out. The floor of my basement isn't exactly perfectly flat either. But in the future, if I ever redo the cabinets in my kitchen, I think I need to invest in a tracksaw to break down the sheet goods. Also the pocket screws, despite copious clamping and jigs, still walked on me when I drilled them in, pulling the whole box slightly out of square. Once again, maybe a 32nd of an inch, but it's every joint, and those errors compound. I think in the future I'm just going to suck it up and route rabbet joints. Should invest in some route bits that are perfectly sized for plywood thicknesses.

I did a test stain of the black, and I think I hate it. Tried out a black walnut stain I have, and I like the warmness of the brown tones a lot more. Think I'm going to go with that instead. Probably also worth doing a prestain treatment because the plywood was a pretty blotchy. Probably from the manufacturing process. I swear you can see where the rollers didn't apply preasure evenly across the sheet how the stain absorbs. I also got my last sheet of plywood mostly broken down into the widths I'll need for the shelves. The side cases get 4 shelves each, the top middle gets 2 and the bottom center gets 1.

The next week I aim to get sanding done, headers and footers, and if I'm lucky all the shelves and trim pieces. I doubt I will be lucky.

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WhiningCoil Ghost of Quokka's Future 3hr ago

I honestly forget precisely how quickly I'd seen it, and if I watched a RLM review first or not. But I did see it in theaters.

Admittedly my decision to see it was somewhat nonsensical. Because TLJ had already killed Star Wars for me, but perhaps I wasn't quite done with my stages of grief yet. Maybe I'd heard it was good? Maybe Ron Howard seemed a steady enough hand to deliver a competent homage to the boomer childhood pastiche that Star Wars lives in, a dirge for a world that is dead and passing out of living memory faster and faster.

At the end of the day, I look forward to one day watching my de-special editioned fan edit of the original trilogy with my children one day. But that will probably be it.

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WhiningCoil Ghost of Quokka's Future 17hr ago

I wish I had seen it in theaters. I bet the disappointment would have been palpable.

In theaters, opening night, at that point the levels of Rian Johnson's "I know that you know that I know that you know" subverting expectations for the sake of subverting expectations had worn me down so much that by that point in the film I felt nothing. I remember being excited that Luke was going to be the badass we desperately wanted to see, being annoyed it was all an illusion, being relieved he was still safe, then just being annoyed/numb that he got killed anyways because fuck it, why not?

I left the theater wondering what the fuck I had just watched. I watched Solo and actually really enjoyed it. It left me thinking only a boomer can make a proper Star Wars movie. I never watched anything Star Wars after that. Not even The Mandalorian. Whatever love I had for Star Wars, which my dog eared West End Games RPG books can attest to, just evaporated after Last Jedi.

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WhiningCoil Ghost of Quokka's Future 18hr ago

I remember deeply enjoying the Thrawn trilogy when I read it a decade ago. It's basically my headcanon Star Wars 7, 8 and 9. Perfectly captures the essence of the original trilogy, gives them a fantastic new villain who challenges them in devilish new ways.

And that's about as far as I got on my "Expanded Universe" exploration. I think I got through another book or two that failed to leave any impression what so ever.

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WhiningCoil Ghost of Quokka's Future 1d ago

That's a bad excuse, and you should feel bad for making it.

Almost everything worth doing is a "nontrivial amount of work". If your excuse to not to do something is "it's a nontrivial amount of work", I'd question how you make it out of bed in the morning, and how often you shower.

Second, it's self evident it's not a high priority, because they haven't done that "nontrivial amount of work" in ten fucking years. The point I, and everyone else is making, is that it should be a high fucking priority.

I'm pretty sure if someone like Steve Jobs was anywhere near that team, he'd have had the least productive member of that team ritually castrated and blood eagled in front of the rest of the team after the first year where it hadn't been done. After the second year he'd have taken all their fraudulent timesheets, used a hydraulic press to form them into the shape of a cyclopean dildo that would make a bad dragon enthusiast swoon, and spitted the next person on that monstrosity.

This is work than any sane person understands needed to have been done, and done over 10 years ago before Windows 8 came out.

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WhiningCoil Ghost of Quokka's Future 1d ago

On the one hand, I feel for your example. I've had my own fair share that aren't to different from yours, where you wonder what fucking genius decided to put that there?!

On the other hand, comprehensible by default is quite the bold standard. I've seen people fail to intuit a single purpose machine with two buttons, one for on/off and another for mode or speed. I'm not sure a turing complete computer will ever be "comprehensible by default" to more than 10% of the population.

But back to the first hand, it can probably, at least, not be nakedly retarded and designed by the most passive aggressive engineer you can imagine, just checking off Jira issues in the laziest manner possible.

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WhiningCoil Ghost of Quokka's Future 2d ago

Oh virtually every language would have caught that. Even when I compile C++ in GCC it at least generates warnings about things like that. My day job in C# lets you nowhere near the memory like that.

But aside from my excursions in assembly, C is as close to bitfucking the CPU as you are allowed to get. Half the string.h library is just nakedly wrapping x86 string instructions.

I keep trying to learn Rust, but sadly the people who teach Rust are too obnoxious for me to learn from.

"Rustacians". Go fuck yourself.

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WhiningCoil Ghost of Quokka's Future 2d ago

A while ago I was noodling around in some C/SDL2 code for a game I'll never finish, as is my wont. I accidentally calloc'd space for a struct* instead of the actual struct. This resulted in me stomping all over pseudo random objects in memory, causing crashes very shortly after. I figured it out after a little bit, but that's the kind of shit that's super easy to do in C.

And I fucking love it. Segfault me harder daddy.

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WhiningCoil Ghost of Quokka's Future 2d ago

When I set up a screensaver on my Win10 PC, first of all, the same screensaver from Win9X still ran flawlessly, and second, I think the config panel for it might have even been identical too?!

But random split between Settings and Control Panel, Win9X/XP style panels and... whatever they call Win8/10 style panels is jarring to say the least. It's like they couldn't, at any point, have had someone go through all that shit and just make sure it's all in one place? Go through all the built in OS panels and make sure they are the same style? It's just bizarre, and feels like there are entire teams who's jobs this should be just... not doing it.

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WhiningCoil Ghost of Quokka's Future 3d ago

You left out the biggest criticism which has nothing to do with AI, at least explicitly.

The "It's my fucking computer, and it'll do what I tell it and nothing more" people. Even before Windows was to become an "agentic AI platform", it was enshittifying with ads, endless features nobody asked for that slowed your computer to a crawl, and it's proposed "Windows Recall" feature had more red flags for privacy advocates than Mamdani's victory party. Windows debloat utilities are common, popular, and at constant war with Microsoft who consistently breaks them. Right before I put Linux on my wife's computer, she was complaining that she couldn't do anything on it. Low and behold "Windows Telemetry" was pegging the CPU at 100% utilization. No fucking clue how it pulled that off.

I'm sure the fact that it's AI doesn't help MIcrosoft's case here. But if they hadn't been nakedly fucking up Windows, more people might have a wait and see approach. As it stands, most people rightly expect this push to be something that makes Windows much slower, breaks a bunch of shit, gets turned on every feature update without being asked, and just generally makes their computer much more frustrating to use. And it'll probably be somehow worse than all of that to boot.

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WhiningCoil Ghost of Quokka's Future 4d ago

I saw a peak behind the curtain when a buddy of mine negotiated with his credit card to forgive his debt.

It turns out, when the CC company forgives your debt, they get to write it off, and it gets put on you as income. So, to give you an idea of how it worked out for my buddy. He lived his best life in his 20's, struggled to pay off his credit cards, got it negotiated, and had probably low 6 to mid 5 figures "forgiven". A sum of money which after 10 years of struggling with the debt, and generally making payments, probably bore no relationship to the amount he actually borrowed. He was then hit with a tax bill on that "income" so high he had to sell his jeep and cash out his 401k to pay it off.

I can only imagine how phenomenal this is for the companies bottom line, and all their shareholders. They get to generate virtually unlimited tax write offs. Every bullshit fee they ever stick you with is win/win for them. Either you pay it, or they write it off in which case you pay the government ~25% of it.

So, in a way, the tax code is the government bailing out the creditors. They get to make up an outrageous almost nonsensical amount of money you owe, forgive it, and then push the tax burden onto you adding insult to injury.

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WhiningCoil Ghost of Quokka's Future 4d ago

Generally I ignore WotC. I think it was some 5-10 years ago a bunch of their higher ups said something like "We need less white dudes in this hobby" and I decided not to give money or attention to people who hate me. But a buddy of mine sent me this video reviewing a book of short adventures WotC published. His conclusion is that WotC has forgotten how to design adventures. Cool dunk bro.

But it occurs to me, a few days later, what might really be happening. Because all these adventures are criticized for being too linear, too bare bones, no room for fleshing out a world or inventive problem solving. And I think, not unlike how D&D in the 00's had MMO/Video Game envy, and aspects of it's design leaned into what they thought people wanted in MMOs and other CRPGs, I think D&D in the current era has Youtube envy and is trying to lean into what they think people want when they watch Critical Roll.

Because short, on rails adventures are perfect if all you want to do is play a session about as long as a youtube play session, and act out imitations of what you saw watching other people play D&D on youtube.

I donno, it's a theory. I have no interest in exploring the current era of D&D products to confirm it, on account of them hating me and all.

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WhiningCoil Ghost of Quokka's Future 4d ago

Sometimes I wonder if "the powers that be" have arrived at the conclusion that letting 20-40 year old women run up insane amounts of credit card debt, that they then pay the minimums on until they die on welfare, raises the GDP more than the alternatives.

At a certain point, the credit card debt is just made up money. When you pay the minimums, you pay so many multiples of what you actually borrowed it's a joke. If you default after paying back 3x the money you borrowed over 20 years, yeah, there is some opportunity cost for the banks that lent you the money, but nobody lost money in absolute terms. And hyper consuming childless 20-40 year olds probably raise the GDP a lot!

That the well dries up eventually... well... there's a new sucker born every minute. And if there aren't enough the US... well... you know my shtick already.

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WhiningCoil Ghost of Quokka's Future 5d ago

I do sound like someone who's worn blackface, don't I?

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WhiningCoil Ghost of Quokka's Future 6d ago

Maybe having no education in high school causes skills to decay? I wonder if these kids scored as competent in middle school math; my bet is that they did, though probably marginally, and they've simply regressed.

You know what surprises me? I don't think I've seen a woodworking video where the woodworker does their own math. I understand mathing fractional inches takes a little bit more effort than decimal cm, but it's all still powers of two. And yet, almost everybody I watch whips out a cell phone, relies on CAD software, or avoids mathing entirely by marking their workpieces against the actual dimensions of the partially completed project.

Apparently that last method is actually the best as compounding errors/imprecision always throw off your calculations. But I feel like my point remains.

Did none of these people ever learn how to do fractions? Even 10-20 years ago when our education system supposedly functioned? I doubt it. I doubt it's just students that are being cognitively mutilated.

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WhiningCoil Ghost of Quokka's Future 6d ago

10 years from now, are we seeing a new sub-class of horrifically incompetent 30 year olds? If so, how does that change policy outcomes.

Infinity Indians. I'm not even joking.

I wish I could form an opinion on this, but there is simply no good data. Kids today are fucking stupid, sure, that's a data point. Is it because of screens? Is it room temperature IQ third worlders? Is it Asian cheating rings? Indian fake credentials? Decades of teachers being activist forwarding a social agenda instead of teaching the "Three R's"? All of the above? None of the above?

We'll never know, and we'll never fix it in time. The default option is to mass import workers from countries that at least fake teaching more convincingly, so that's the option that will be taken. This study won't contribute to any positive change what so ever, and will instead by another talking point behind the further ethnic cleansing of the nation.

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