I haven’t actually scratch built a model in a long time. Last one was an airplane that was really fun to fly! I challenged myself to build it as light weight as I could so it flew extremely slowly. I could just about walk behind it! It looked kinda like this: Except not as light and covered in tissue paper instead of that thin plastic film. These days I’ve mostly been flying and fixing/modifying rc planes that I bought mostly complete. But they’re made of molded foam because it’s a very light and low-labor way of making complex shapes. But I really want to make a plane from scratch soon, except instead of foam I want to make it out of wood (mostly balsa since it’s super light). I might try to build one that can carry my camera to do more aerial photography!

I’ve also built an rc car from a kit which I had a lot of fun doing, and I have my eyes on another one I want to build! But I want to start building the plane first cause that’s been a long time coming of imagining it.

It’s a blessing and a curse, but my cat loves drinking from the bathroom sink and tub. At this point he has me trained to turn it on for him. As for miniatures, I am currently working on Malifaux. It’s more budget friendly than Warhammer at this point and it’s a skirmish style, making for games that don’t take 2 hours. I also never intend to go back to playing Warhammer given how they temporarily got rid of Tomb Kings. That Mummy/Skeleton army is super rad and honestly fun to play if you want to tackle people with chariots all day. Hope you’re doing better today. Every bit counts, even the emotionally drained days that follow the roughest of times.

Its important to stick around so you can help others out! Also helps when you’re feeling bad to remember the good things you’ve done

Hah, I guess I don’t consider them pranks, but I like to do video calls with my friends I’m not officially out to while wearing full make up just to see if anyone says anything

They never do. Although, they’ve seen me in dresses and shit lol

You are quite welcome, and I agree being outlived by Genocide Joe and 9/11 Architect Cheney would be a cruel cosmic joke to be sure. Hang in there, good things DO happen occasionally, and our side needs all the comrades we can get.

its also (surprisingly) nice in red tea

Oh, no , chili with mint is a separate thingie, I just wanted to test how hot and cold food feels together.

Figure chili would be too weird in a cookie. Although black pepper might work

I’ll keep you updated

Nah usual ginger cookies, but because I have a small oven, I have to bake in 3 goes, so I try some stuff with them

I probably should have specified what kind.

Mostly I do classical because I am just learning. By coincidence of their form, the jazz pieces I know how to play don’t sound as interesting with it.

The specific problem is that it’s somehow not calibrated to handle polyphony correctly, so when you have just one note, it comes out fine, but when you have multiple they sort of crowd each other and it creates distortion, with more notes being more distorted. Because of that, when a song has, to use the example that has the best effect so far, a monophonic melody but then the accompanying notes vary in number, the melody gets more and less distorted and it adds a new dimension to the song. With the songs I play, which tend to be mildly positive, it tends to sound very somber in an almost mocking way, partly because the soundfont is that of an organ to start with.

of course!

A clear cut case of me not wanting to over explain, so I under explain I hope this comes out semi readable.

A “mob” in minecraft is all the non player characters/entities. cows, chickens and pigs are all passive mobs, creepers, zombies, spiders and skeletons are all hostile mobs. There’s more, but those last 4 are what this farm “spawns” (they just appear out of thin air). Mobs all have their own spawning conditions, but these four need somewhere dark, on a solid block, and somewhat close but not too close to the player. There is also a cap on how many hostile mobs can be in the world at any one time. We exploit these mechanics by building in the middle of an ocean. This ensures mobs can’t spawn in caves or other areas on the surface, slowing the farm. The place for the player to stand is way up in the sky, so nothing can spawn in caves under the ocean We have multiple platforms stacked up for them to spawn on, and then have a machine periodically place water, to flush the mobs down the kill chamber where they die from fall damage.

The filtering out part is going to sound complicated, but is actually very easy to build. First I should say that creepers drop gunpowder, which is the main thing we wanted from this farm but my friends build the farm wrong (creepers have subtly different requirements, for example zombies and skeletons need a full two blocks to spawn in, but creepers need more like 1.9 blocks. If you place trap doors on every block mobs can spawn, you will block zombies and skeletons from ever spawning. Unfortunately we missed a few spots so we get a few of those.). Gunpowder has two main uses, rockets and tnt. Personally I never use tnt but one of my friends was insistent that we have some separated out. Rockets are incredibly useful. When you fly with an elytra its more of a glide without them to boost you along. With the rockets you go way faster, and can fly up instead of just gliding to the ground. Obviously flying everywhere is more fun and faster so we go through a lot of rockets.

Anyway to filter the gunpowder out we have all the items (string, bones, rotten flesh, and the gunpowder) through a line of hoppers. Hoppers are a block that take items from one place and move them to another place, like another hopper, autocrafter, or a chest. So we have this line of hoppers, that will take all the items and underneath is a hopper that only has gunpowder in it and can’t move the items anywhere because it is powered/“locked” (funny how that works isn’t it, usually things only work when powered). So it can’t move items from itself, but can still pick them up. When it grabs one more item, it triggers a comparator (just a little redstone component that detects how many items are in a hopper or chest). This is linked up to unpower the hopper for a brief moment, letting the locked hopper release one item. This line underneath now only has gunpowder. I take that to a bunch of chests to store it in, and then once all those chests are full it takes the gunpowder to the rocket making part of the farm. Also a quick note, the unfiltered items (rotten flesh, string, etc) just get put in some other chests or discarded if those are full. They weren’t the focus of the farm (we actually took a few steps to not get any, but alas).

Whew! That was a lot of information. Hope I didn’t lose you. Let’s talk about my snake for a minute before I talk about the rocket half, which I am very excited to talk about because it was all my own design.

I’m kind of terrible with names I usually just call her the banana, because she is a banana ball python. She’s actually a lot brighter of a yellow then any of those pictures, like unbelievably yellow. Her brightest yellows look more like the yellows on an albino. But she is not an albino, she doesn’t have any white and she has those cute looking black dots. I would post a picture but snakes can have fairly unique patterns and I am overly cautious (paranoid). I can DM you a few pictures if you want though.

Anyway (my god I can talk, right?) She’s around 6, I’ve had her for about half that. I bought her from a breeder who was moving out of state, and couldn’t keep everything so she was already an adult. Most of the time when she’s out, she’s wrapped around my arm or someone else’s. I will put her on the ground and let her wander around for a little bit every time I get her out, but there’s a lot of places for her to get lost (hide, in her mind) and once she does she isn’t going to come out willingly. Once they have found a little crevice or hide for themselves, they go from “oh let’s explore” mode to “I am hidden, and will stand my ground against anyone who wishes to take me from my safe space” mode, so that’s a bit of a problem Snakes have very distinct behavioral “modes” they go in to and keeping them in the right one is really important (but not very hard!).

Wow I love talking about snakes. Let’s see… we had just finished sorting the gunpowder from everything else, and bringing it to the sugar cane farm. The sugar cane is harvested automatically by a flying machine. I have some observers (another redstone component, this time it powers when a block “updates” [which can mean a lot of things, in this case its when the sugar cane below it grows]) that trigger the harvesting. It triggers both the collection system (a hopper in a minecart which loops around under the sugar cane), and the flying machine to break it all. Honestly I don’t understand how it works well enough to explain it, but its two pistons pushing and pulling each other and it just works. The hopper minecart unloads all of the sugar cane it picked up and the flying machine returns to the activation mechanism.

A hopper takes the sugar cane and puts it into an autocrafter. A comparator measures how many are in there, and when it hits three sends a signal to craft it into paper. This paper is then combined with gunpowder to make firework rockets. I use comparitors to make sure both are at least somewhat stocked and if they both are, that generates a pulse to make the crafter spit out rockets. I wired it up to repeat this pulse until it runs out of either ingredient, then it shuts off. I know it sounds like the lamest part but getting it to loop properly with the timings and not triggering more then its supposed to (if you trigger the crafter at the wrong time, or put too many items in you can get the wrong output which would fill the firework/rocket chests and look ugly) was really challenging

I have always thought of them as like ancient Chinese fireworks, having them be sugar powered makes them even more low tech then that and I love it.

Bootstrapped myself from NEET Linux nerd to RHEL infrastructure nerd with the help of a relative.

I am a little scared of being deepsouth wihout the funds for a decent gun, but very excited about the work itself.

No problem!

It took a lot of time, and a lot of change. A few years ago I had a really bad job, no friends, and no family nearby to speak of. I had moved far away for a job for a fresh start, with no safety net. Conditions were unsafe, working hours were long with no overtime, and higher-ups were abusive. I had no safety net, so I stuck with it for a while to escape it.

Eventually, I met my partner while working there, a true sweetheart. I found a new job, we moved to a new city, got another fresh start, but this time I had a better career and a safety net. Things got better, got back to cooking and reading, and really was able to feel content.

Basically, a whole lot of luck, and the willingness and ability to get out.

One thing I want to stress is that there were several times where I felt hopeless and with no way out, but time passing really does change everything.

As for Malenia, she is a boss in Elden Ring, haha. I’ve had a bit of extra time lately and wanted to finally play it. Beat her last night, finally!

Little bit of Path of Exile, Astroneer, Lethal Company. I used to play a lot of Valorant with my friends but my life immediately got better when I quit that game entirely