Captain Aggravated @ captain_aggravated @sh.itjust.works Posts 63Comments 6,123Joined 2 yr. ago
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.
Check my understanding here: It's not that they're scarce, but there's no geological process that concentrates them like copper or gold. There aren't any neodymium seams the way there are gold seams, there's a very little amount everywhere. So you might as well sift the entire Mojave.
Pretty sure they're parodying Close Encounters of the Third Kind there. The one where an alien ship is approaching blasting out these tones, and Fry thinks he remembers it, they build this huge elaborate keyboard setup and Fry plays two notes on it and it turns out it's Nibbler shenanigans? That's parodying Close Encounters.
I think I can almost recommend going and watching Star Trek IV on its own, the plot is mostly self-contained for being the third in a trilogy, but I think it does stand on its own. It also has a profoundly good soundtrack, like, even for Star Trek.
Don't mistake me for a scholar, now. I'm a guy with a thickness planer in his backyard shed that's read a couple books and watched a lot of videos about building furniture. I'm confident I could defend the rank of "enthusiast."
That said, it is something I liked about Reddit. You could post "Left-handed theoretical psycho-ornithologists of Reddit..." and you'd get at least a few credible answers.
Okay so there are layers to this question:
Why does antique furniture usually have carved feet?
First, antique furniture tends to be the fancy stuff for rich people. Modest furniture made out of a few boards for the unwashed masses usually isn't considered for preservation, but the fancy shit rich people bought got kept.
Rich people tend to like to show off how rich they are. And one way to do that up until fairly recently was through furniture. Maybe you use exotic wood, but even if you don't do that you pay a woodworker to waste his life carving useless intricate details like pineapple newel posts or ornate table legs.
The claw-clutching-a-ball design apparently comes from China, it's supposed to be a dragon's foot clutching a jewel. The British adopted it in the Queen Anne period because it's ornate, fancy and foreign exotic. Rich people get to brag that they got their table, or a taste for the style, "during their travels." Ball-and-claw feet specificall would fall out of fashion with the Chippendale era though fancy schmancyness would hit an all time maximum, and then the industrial revolution happened.
It used to take a skilled artisan to make carvings like that with a chisel. Now, we have duplicating machines that can batch them out dozens at a time. This episode of the New Yankee Workshop shows this off. When building his Lowboy, Norm doesn't even try to carve cabriole legs, he buys them from a company that makes them, and we get a little footage of the factory. This is why you don't see the Zuckerbergs of the world showing off ostentatious carved furniture: ornate carvings are commodity items now. You can buy furniture with cabriole legs and arch cornices at any of those big warehouses out by the highway with a "Going out of business forever" sign out front.
Is it only ornamental?
95% yes. Speaking as a woodworker I can tell you, people overwhelmingly like looking at tapered legs. Our own legs taper, so we tend to copy that. From fancy cabriole legs to simple shaker furniture. A flared foot of any kind is mostly ornamental because again our own feet flare out, but there is a bit of a practical purpose: A larger surface area with a rounded edge is easier to slide across the floor than a small, sharply edged end of a board. It doesn't tend to dig in as much, particularly on carpet. Also, the rounded features are more difficult to chip and splinter.
Why are they usually webbed feet?
It's meant to be a dragon's foot, so somewhere between reptilian and birdlike. It is also furniture, not a statue, so it's rather stylized and not very anatomical.
They became unaffordable 16 foot long diaper bags.
The plot of the fourth movie, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, is a slightly off the wall plot.
A giant alien space probe arrives in orbit of Earth making weird noises, it sucks up all the power from ships in orbit and power grids on the surface and starts evaporating the oceans. Turns out it wants to talk to humpback whales, which in this timeline were hunted to extinction in the 20th century, so there are no humpback whales on earth for the probe to talk to, and it's literally tearing up the oceans to find them.
Meanwhile, Kirk and his crew of main characters are on Vulcan (Spock's home planet) in possession of a stolen Klingon warship which they've been preparing for the flight back to Earth to face court martial, because of the events of the previous movie. They learn of the problem before they reach Earth, they figure out that the probe wants to talk to whales. "can we pretend to be whales?" "we can make the sounds, but we don't speak the language." So they just casually decide to time travel by doing a high speed lap of the sun. No shit they just fly really fast around the sun and arrive in the 1980's, where it just so happens the Bay Aquarium has a breeding pair of captive humpback whales on display. Meanwhile, the trip through time ran them out of fuel. Cue a LucasArts style multi-problem plot where they have to figure out how to refuel their ship, modify it to carry humpback whales, find and acquire the whales, and then get back to the future.
Spoiler alert: They do. They crash their ship into 23rd century San Fransisco bay and release the whales, which do this whole new age thing with the probe, which then goes "Understandable, have a nice day" sucks in its volleyball and floats away. Then that court martial scene which is actually part of the previous movie not this one ensues, where Kirk is punished with a reward.
TL;DR the main plot of the fourth movie involves the Enterprise's crew, but not the Enterprise, going back in time to bring humpback whales back from extinction.
The plot was originally written as a plague that could only be cured with a plant that's extinct, but they went with the whale plot because it's more visual.
Architects or advertising executives. Sometimes lead male is one and lead female is the other.
I think it was one of the writers on Cracked that opined it's because those are the only jobs screenwriters partially understand. They're people who pitch ideas to customers, kind of like screenwriters do with scripts. So you get a lot of main characters that have a weirdly large amount of down time, a looming deadline to present an idea for an ad campaign or building to your boss and the three executives your boss is kissing up to. Is it the moment of triumph for our main character, has our main character had a change of heart that he can't run a greenwashing campaign for ExxonMobile anymore because hippy dippy love interest got to him, and now his previous life is going to fall apart and he's going to start over as a shop owner in a small town or something...
I don't really have any before/after pics of today's project; not a lot about the building changed in a meaningful way (I moved some clamps I don't use very often to the roof.) I mostly jus kind of cleaned up and put things back where they go. I'll give you a tour though; these pictures have a little age on them but they're basically current. Won't take long, it's a 10x12 shed.
This shot is standing in the doorway looking in, on the left hand side you've got the router table on that godawful old kitchen table, drill press on its cart, the mill cart with planer and jointer beyond, end of the aisle you've got my table saw folded up there's no hope of using it in the building, it has to get wheeled out for use) and then the work table with miter saw station on the right. Stock loft above the back wall at convenient head hitting height, with the supply shelf below.
Detail shot of the workbench, with a rack of cheap parts bins from Harbor Freight for hardware and such below, along with scrap storage. Most of those tool cases have been moved under the drill press. Note the clamp department over there to the right, near the door. The pipe clamps have been replaced with parallel jaw clamps. That stock support to the left of the miter saw is a mistake, in fact I'd like to rethink that whole damn table. But, I built that table before I knew this was going to be a furniture shop. So. Also: Don't get the brown pegboard. get white pegboard. Absorbs less light.
Other side of the shop...I am personally unimpressed with that Bosch router table and would recommend buying a lift and building your own router table than buying that one. Once I get my peertube channel off the ground I'm going on a longform rant about it.
When you have a space as small as this, you do have to make use of any little space you can. Everything but the router table is on wheels and everything can go right out the door and down the ramp, so my 10x12 foot shop unpacks to be, well, backyard sized. A minor thing I did today was install some hooks between the joists of the stock loft so I can hang some smaller scraps up there.
A lot of offcuts and scrap have piled up along the back wall, I need to come up with some projects to use some of that up. If I had a shop twice this one's size, I'd instantly pack it this dense.
We were each given like a quarter teaspoon of grounds and a toothpick.
Gah you fuggin beat me to it!
It's not going to get better until we start killing office buildings full of these people.
I asked Google Gemini to create a dimensional drawing of a night stand with one drawer.
