Tools are a good idea. Probably should follow your lead on that…
Tools are a good idea. Probably should follow your lead on that…
I’m mostly looking at whether I would have made any medium sized purchases in the next two yearsl. I might buy some little things in bulk, too, but if there’s any one time purchase where the price is going to jump $200, $300, $500, it’s time to make a decision.
For me that mostly means furniture. I already bought a pair of commodity IKEA bookshelves I’d been considering buying vs building. I might still build replacements, but I would still use what I just bought and domestic lumber won’t be directly subject to a tariff. I’m looking at buying a papasan chair and a mattress as well, probably in the next week or two.
I’ve also considered electronics, but there’s nothing I would buy in the next two years short of some PC components that I’m sure I’ll want. I bought a Quest 3 a while back and it’s been a great purchase.
I did go back through some of my online buying this year to see what I used. I’ll probably buy a few pairs of work shoes and some good soap.
Buncha dumb fucks. Get ready to learn about the Supremacy Clause, hicks.
President Vance is going to skullfuck you into twenty years of Y’allqaeda Law. You don’t get to pick which Republican policies you like.
Sunrise here, tomorrow, is around 7:30. When I take my morning walk, presumably just after I wake up at 5:30 because the walk is supposed to “get my brain ready to work” and I’m supposed to put several hours of work in during the morning, how do I “get sunlight in my eyes”?
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I really appreciate your effort on this forum. I barely thought about Lemmy as a resource for the Olympics until it was too late, which looking back a huge bummer. I also didn’t watch nearly enough…
I am already looking forward to 2026. Going to approach it very differently.
Some B350m models did get Zen 3 compatibility. Not all, if I remember correctly, though I could be wrong. So whether it’s compatible I think is model dependent. Whether an old B350m has the VRMs for a chunkier CPU would also be a reasonable question.
I mentioned the R5 3600 because the prices on them are great. A 5800X3D does perform better, but I see completed eBay listings at $225+. They also needs a cooler. I see one 3600 that went for about $50 and several that went for $60, which isn’t too much more than a 16gb kit of DDR4.
I would definitely consider a Zen3 CPU for this upgrade, depending on budget.
First generation Ryzen struggles with higher memory speed. You very likely will not get the full 3600MT/s. There’s no real reason to buy slower, just be aware you’re likely going to hit a ceiling.
For gaming you might see bigger improvements from upgrading the CPU, maybe to an R5 3600. That and the memory are both going to offer big performance improvement.
Scratch patterns are in my experience a little overblown, particularly at high degrees of polish. The sharpener they linked you finishes on ceramic, which generally is fairly fine.
Pull through sharpeners’ biggest problem is that they can’t practically get a clean, consistent apex that follows the sweep of the edge. To get close the housing of the sharpening material needs to be extremely rigid, the pressure used needs to be consistent and light, the angle of the knife in the sharpener needs to be consistent from pull to pull, and the sharpening material needs to be very clean. Otherwise the act of sharpening, while perhaps polishing the bevel, drives the apex into steel residue or abrasive or shifts its angle. That will round, grind down, or rip tiny chunks out of the apex. Still gets a pretty sharp edge.
I don’t find pull throughs suffer much with regard to retention. They don’t get a knife as sharp initially, so they do start with a shorter clock. But from there retention is okay. They completely avoid wire edges, which is nice, so in inexperienced hands in a way they much improve retention.
For most knife steels and uses, pull through sharpeners are okay when used with a light hand. What I’m calling a “clean, consistent apex” isn’t practically necessary in pocket knives. The Sharpmaker and several cheap jigs can produce edges like that, though, and those edges definitely feel better in use. At the reasonable additional cost that’s worth it to a lot of people.
It is possible to sharpen a recurve edge on a waterstone with a rounded corner, but having wasted my time learning how I prefer the Sharpmaker. It’s near enough to the same speed, more intuitive, and more difficult for a new sharpener to make a mistake.
Some jigs have rounded stones specifically for recurves; I know there is a Lansky set. I haven’t used one, myself.
I suspect almost all heavy use recurve blades, carpet knives come to mind, are sharpened using pull through sharpeners. There are shaped sharpening stones specifically for recurves historically used in trade work, but they’re going to kind of suck.
Perhaps not a useful avenue for you right now, but my best results on recurves have by far been from paper wheels.
I know you asked how, but if you end up with only a few recurves paying a pro to do it is a reasonable option. Sharpening recurves is a niche inside a niche. No method I’ve tried of doing it by hand feels elegant or “right”.
The solution to this problem is delicious.
I’ve had an argument with a CEC about whether brown sauce or demi-glace is the mother sauce. Quote from Escoffier:
“[Demi-glace] is the base of all the other smaller brown sauces.”
He also says demi-glace is “Espagnole sauce having reached the limit of perfection.” It’s not crazy to say they’re the same sauce, just that one is actually done.
Functionally it’s true, you just don’t use brown sauce as an ingredient for much if anything other than demi. Or more commonly just buy the demi to save space and time.
Escoffier’s version includes veal, but it is made using milk. Page 21.
https://archive.org/details/cu31924000610117/page/21/mode/1up
Yes, the US Constitution filters down. Part of it reads:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
That is known as the Supremacy Clause.
Yeah, to be honest my point is there are many good games out there. That said…
For people who want high fantasy but not D&D, I’d recommend Pathfinder 2e. For people who want something a little more dangerous and stripped down and are coming from D&D, Worlds Without Number. For anyone I recommend Call of Cthulhu and Dread. Everyone should read Blades in the Dark, even if they don’t want to play in the setting.
Also, from the other comments below: Traveller: Space Adventures! The Game. The rumor is Firefly was based on Joss Whedon’s Traveller game, and that’s how Traveller plays. Amazing character creation system that lets players control some of their background, but mirrors real life in that not everything goes as planned. The setting is very, very deep. I admit I would probably play Scum and Villainy (Blades in the Dark in Space) or Stars Without Number (the predecessor to WWN) instead, but it’s up there. The One Ring Roleplaying Game: Very much a system to play stories not just in Middle Earth but in the style of LotR. I have not played this and have no intent to do so, but it’s clever in its own little hobbit hole way. I have read it. Cool dice.
I haven’t read Shadowdark or Pugmire. Shadowdark looks, for my purposes, similar to Worlds Without Number or Shadow of the Demon Lord. As for Pugmire I use Mouseguard for my Redwall adjacent stuff, but I would sit in a few sessions for sure.
The variations are usually just named after whoever wrote a book about the move back in the 1850s or whatever. So in a way, yes, random name generator, often done a long time ago. The names were more useful back in Ye Olden Times when people didn’t consistently use the same sorts of chess notation. Now chess notation is standardized world wide.
The funny thing is this opening is actually very organic. Someone with even basic understanding of opening theory would very possibly play it if they learned the three moves required for the Ruy Lopez.
I get the spirit of the comment, but among people who often play multiple TTRPGs almost no one would call D&D their favorite. I would be worried if Tencent (or Hasbro) bought Arc Dream or Evil Hat, but in practice the John Harpers of the world leave and start another company using their corporate lucre. In fact that’s where Paizo started, from people peeling off of D&D after Hasbro acquired it.
Tabletop games are such a functionally cheap product to create and sell it’s impossible to truly stomp out competition. Tencent would have to buy Twitch and YouTube and disallow any other game, and even then every nerd convention in the world would have some guy selling stapled together zines that rips D&D a new asshole.
Tl;dr: I don’t give a shit if Tencent buys D&D.
Everything people are scared Tencent might do to D&D has already been done by Hasbro: the MMORPG conversion (4th edition), canning all the staff (happens every few years, and to Magic too), adding DLC (just take a look at the current official app), walling off the garden (three tries on that one: once with 4th, once recently with the OGL stuff, and once with the limitations on animations in map applications), even the movie.
D&D the rules system has been a corpse for years, that the designers managed to make 5th into a passable game is a miracle. Play Pathfinder, Blades in the Dark, Call of Cthulhu, Savage Worlds, Fate, Vampire, GURPS, Shadow of the Demon Lord, Dread, Worlds Without Number, Mothership, Numenera, Mork Borg, Everyone is John, any of the dozen variations on those games, or one of the hundreds of other options not yet listed. They pretty much all run as well if not better than D&D.
Millennia!
And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables; And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father’s house a house of merchandise.
John 2:15-16
The type of dice used can meaningfully impact this. The chance of a 2 or 12 rolling 2d6 is 1/36, the chance rolling 1d8+1d4 is 1/32. The chance of rolling 7 on 2d6, the most common result, is 1/6. The chance of rolling a 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9 on a 1d8+1d4, all equally likely, is 1/8 each.
Unlike you I can’t begin to remember the elegant way to find this. I also assume Randall would have it at least close to right.