Fondots

joined 1 year ago
[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

You would not be the first to point out the Cartman parallels, it definitely crossed my mind while I was writing it out.

[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

In the sense that chronologically I saw one piece before I purchased a straw hat, then technically yes I suppose.

I'm not about to draw a correlation between an anime I first caught a few episodes of on cartoon network in 20 or so years ago and the Panama hat I purchased a decade later though.

[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 20 points 2 days ago

Clinically, no.

Do I have occasional feelings of sadness, anxiety, ennui, helplessness, despair, lack of motivation, etc, and do bad things happen in my life?

Yes, absolutely, that's a part of being human.

Am I happy?

Well that's a more complicated question than it may seem.

Am I totally satisfied with every aspect of my life and the world around me as it is now and where it seems to be going?

No, not by a longshot.

Is my situation "good enough" for now, does it seem like things will improve for me, do my good days outnumber the bad, am I overall enjoying life and looking forward to hopefully many more years of it, am I able to spend time with people I love, in places I want to be, doing things I like and want to do?

Overall, yes. Not that there isn't plenty of room for things to improve for me and lots of things that I would change if I could but I can't, but I'm getting enough of the things I want out of life that I can say that overall I'm happy.

[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah I think the way a lot of chairs are constructed is just a bad use case for glue. Like you said, chairs are under a lot of stress (tension, compression, shear, cleavage, peel- glue can handle some of these well and others not,) there's a lot of weird ways you can put leverage on the joints, people don't tend to sit perfectly still so those loads are dynamic and always shifting a bit, and to make it worse they kind of have to be designed to be somewhat lightweight, easy to move around, small enough to fit under a table, etc so there's always some compromises made and they're never as overbuilt as they probably should be.

Different kind of construction, but I work in a 911 dispatch center, we have some ridiculously overbuilt chairs that are supposed to be rated for someone to be occupying them 24/7. They cost a ridiculous amount of money and they're still breaking in new and spectacular ways almost constantly. It's tough to build a good chair.

There's also of course issues that can arise from bad surface prep, poor fitment, improper clamping, too little glue, not letting it dry long enough too high/low temperature/humidity/moisture, the wood shrinking/expanding, poorly thought-out joints that don't have enough surface area or are putting the glue under the wrong kind of stresses, and of course sometimes you're asking the glue to do something it doesn't do well, it's good at gluing wood to wood, but not nearly as good at gluing paint to paint or varnish to varnish.

[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago (5 children)

That is usually what I go with, because I normally only keep one bottle of wood glue around and it covers pretty much any use case I could ever have for wood glue being waterproof, safe for indirect food contact, etc.

But honestly, for general gluing furniture together and such, even the cheapest no-name brands of wood glue have always done just fine. Pretty much any wood glue out there is stronger than any wood you're likely getting the be gluing (inb4 some carpentry nerd chimes in with some rare wood that only grows in New Zealand or something that is stronger than steel or something)

[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

For some reason I have a thought in my head that I don't like Elmer's wood glue. I don't know why, I don't remember it ever letting me down.

[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago

Judge Dread was a fine movie for people who are into that sort of movie (and I am) but it was a pretty terrible adaptation of the comics.

[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago (5 children)

And the book wasn't living up to the original radio series

Mostly kidding on that

I agree that I like the book better, initially I disliked the movie, but I've come around on it, some things from the radio series were changed for the book, and so it just kind of feels right they'd further change things for the movie. Playing a little fast and loose with it feels very in the Douglass Adams spirit to me.

[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 43 points 2 days ago (13 children)

Wood glue, no particular brand recommendations, is one of the pew products I trust to do exactly what it claims to - glue wood.

[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 15 points 2 days ago

I've worn mine long and hard and haven't gotten to test out the warranty yet, the first pair I bought is probably closing in on a decade and nearly indistinguishable from pairs that are several years newer. Even if they don't honor their warranty for some reason I feel like I've gotten my money's worth and then some.

[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 36 points 2 days ago (1 children)

My grandfather had dementia, for a long time it was pretty hard to tell what was dementia and what was just him not giving a fuck. He was always someone who just did whatever he wanted and wasn't afraid to go against the grain and didn't really care what anyone thought of him, and he was kind of always that way. It would be really hard to pick apart which of his quirks were dementia related and what was just him. Standing naked in the doorway of his room at the nursing home waggling his dick at the lady across the hall sure sounds a lot like a dementia patient, but it also sounds like something an immature, womanizing troublemaker would do if they knew they were pretty much immune from getting in any actual trouble.

He didn't have the most severe case of dementia, it didn't progress super fast, I'm sure if I went months or years without seeing him I could have picked out some changes, but since we saw him regularly it was really difficult to see the changes over time.

And if he had an army of lackeys getting paid to cover up his mistakes and trying to keep him in line, he probably could have passed as relatively mentally competent almost up until the very end.

I won't pretend that my grandfather's moral compass always pointed north, but he definitely had one. He could also be pretty charming and personable when he wanted to. If he threw his morals out the window and had any political ambitions, he probably could have become an even more dangerous trump if someone had given him a small loan of a million dollars. Luckily all he ever really wanted to do was drive a bus.

Funnily enough, most of his siblings ended up fairly rich thanks to a successful business venture my grandfather wasn't interested in. Those branches of the family turned out a lot of real conservative assholes, and once the money started drying up, also a lot of criminals a generation or two down the line.

[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 50 points 3 days ago (2 children)

We have 2 major incidents

First one:

Dude A lends Dude B some money, relatively small amount, pretty sure it was less than $50. Dude B decides he's not going to pay it back, so like mature, reasonable teenagers they decide they're going to go to the park after school to fight about it.

Dude A is not a big guy, he asks Dude C who is a giant of a human being to come along just to make sure he doesn't get killed, sort of a referee to pull dude B off of him if things get out of hand, not expecting him to step in or lend a hand or anything.

Dude B apparently has a different idea about how this is going to go down, and has a few friends come along with him with screwdrivers and baseball bats and other such improvised weapons.

Dude C sees this as they're about to walk off the school property to fight, and does his job, takes these weapons, throws them in his bag, throws his jacket over the protruding bat, and they're about to continue on their way.

The school, however, got word of this fight about to go down, and a bunch of cops show up.

Dude A lucks the fuck out and a passing senior he kind of knew pulls him into her car and assures the police that he wasn't involved in this clusterfuck. None of the other kids give him up and he gets off scott-free and cops never figured out who the last unnamed party to this was.

The rest of them are all taken in, questioned, and receive their various punishments. Dude C gets the worst of it since he's the guy who's now holding all the weapons. He goes and spends a year or so at an alternative school, and is allowed to come back partially on the condition that he joins the football team. Our senior year we proceeded to win 0 football games, so fat lot of good having a giant on the team did.

Apparently dude C had misled his friends about how much money this was over, when informed by the cops that it was over like $40 he flew into a small rage, threw some things around, then calmly sat down and said "I have been misinformed"

Rumors of course start swirling and the truth gets very lost to the point I heard a version of the story where Dude C attacked the cops with a samurai sword and tried to flee on a motorcycle.

I'm pretty confident that this is a pretty accurate version of events though, a couple of the involved parties have all told me pretty much the exact same story, and it's relatively unspectacular compared to some of the embellished versions I've heard. It's also pretty much in line with what I know of their personalities.

For the most part, these kids weren't dangerous, I don't think any of them really had any other significant problems for the rest of their school career, and I'd describe most of them as nerds and generally decent people, some of them have some mental/emotional baggage, and couple that with some hormones and being stupid teenagers the stars just kind of aligned in the wrong way, and for the most part none of them held any significant grudges against each other and could probably have been considered friends to some extent afterwards.

Second incident:

I'm home sick one day, my mom worked at a school in our district, my sister was in school this day.

The phone rings, it's an automated message from the district. Something about the district being made aware of a threat to the high school, but that everything is under control, there's no danger, etc. not a lot of details.

Call my mom, she doesn't have much more info than I do, she's, not particularly worried, but of course a lot of parents panic and go to pick up their kids. She texts my sister to see if she wants to be picked up, she declines, she's having a good time, it's her and like 3 other people left in her class, they're chilling and watching movies and such, there's a news crew and some cop cars outside of the school.

Having nothing better to do, I'm going through all the news I can to figure out what's up.

Eventually, it took a few days for all of the details to emerge, what we managed to piece together was

There was a kid who was planning a shooting, tried to recruit another kid who turned him in. Cops raided his house, found a bunch of airsoft guns, flea market swords, a half-built pipe bomb, and one gun (that his parents bought him) with no ammo.

This kid had been pulled out of school and was being homeschooled because of bullying. I didn't know him, he was a few years younger than me, but from what I understand from people who knew him he was mostly bullied because he was an unlikeable racist asshole. The short bit of attention the media gave it tried to make it out like he was bullied for being fat (and let's make no mistake, this dude was fat he may have been almost as wide as he was tall) but from the stories I've heard of him from before this happened, if any kid ever deserved bullying it was him for being such a major asshole.

I wouldn't really mention his fatness, except that at some point during the trial and such, his mom (herself a very large lady) got in trouble for trying to smuggle him food, which was just icing on the proverbial cake.

The kid who turned him then went and broke into his house a little while later and tried to steal his Xbox or something.

 

The wife and I have been looking for a good excuse to dress to the nines and have a fancy night out

So what do you got for me, Philly? Fancy restaurants, swanky cocktail bars, jazz clubs, the opera, black tie galas, anywhere we're not gonna be "those overdressed weirdos" if we show up in a nice suit and fancy dress.

 
 

I recently got my hands on a very old but still totally serviceable full-sized deli slicer, and my local restaurant depot is very liberal about handing out day passes to anyone who walks in and asks for one, and the savings buying a whole log of meat and slicing it yourself are pretty bonkers, totally worth the pain in the ass that is breaking it down to clean when I'm done.

Of course it's just the wife and I, and 6lbs of Pastrami is a lot for us to go through before it goes bad. So far I've mostly been getting a few friends to chip in and divying up stuff between us or doing a little bartering and trading lunch meat for homemade bread and such, but I'd like to start freezing some to have on-hand.

Anyone have any experience with this to share? I have a vacuum sealer and a deep freezer to work with.

Which meats freeze well, which don't? Is it worth trying to slice it then package and freeze it in smaller portions, or should I freezer larger chunks of meat then thaw and slice it as-needed? Should I just abandon the idea of freezing and stick with the little ad hoc food co-op thing I have going?

Of particular interest to me is homemade roast beef and turkey, I'm never going back to the deli counter for those after I've been making my own (those boneless turkey roasts are amazing for this purpose, even if I'm sure there's a little meat glue involved in them)

Also cheese, I've never really contemplated freezing cheese until I found myself with a 9lb block of Swiss in my fridge. My gut says cheese doesn't do well in the freezer, but my gut has been wrong before.

I also kind of like the idea of having pretty much a lifetime supply of prosciutto in my freezer, although a quick Google search seems to tell me that prosciutto does not freeze well at all, which seems odd to me, since it's pretty low-moisture I would have thought it would freeze spectacularly well.

Besides that, anyone have any other cool ideas about what I can do with a slicer? I've already sliced down some beef to make cheesesteaks, and when I get my smoker up and running when the weather gets nicer I'm going to have a go at making my own bacon, and will probably use it to slice down beef for jerky as well.

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