Each time I tell this story, I try to make it shorter and more terse.

Circa 2012 or 2013 I bought a Raspberry Pi as part of my ham radio hobby. With that I learned a little bit of Python and Bash, learned to type sudo etc, and kinda liked what I saw. Meanwhile, my Win 7 laptop died right as I was going back to school, so I bought a new laptop. This new laptop had two problems: 1. it came with Windows 8.1 and 2. it was a lemon. For most of the first semester going back to school I had no reliable laptop. The only modern supported computer I had was that Raspberry Pi. And for most of a semester that’s what I did school assignments and email on until I finally bullied Dell into replacing that lemon Inspiron they sold me outright.

So by the time I got a reliable x86 laptop in hand, Linux felt more normal to me than Win 8.1 did. So I fully switched.

That was 10 years ago now, and for the last decade I’ve heard Windows users do nothing but piss and moan about the new holes Microsoft has found to fuck them in.

guillotines are renaissance era.

Amazon certainly helped.

The stagnation of several anchor stores like Sears also helped. Sears was in serious decline well before Amazon became a major player in the market.

He has published his audio book about the airship R101 under a creative commons license, if you haven’t seen that yet I’d check it out.

I am okay with some billboards that advertise services that are relevant to motorists, such as fuel, food or lodging near the road.

Product placements in television shows where the ad becomes part of the fiction.

I officially stopped watching Eureka when there was an episode about Degree For Men. I similarly gave up on Bones when the characters started delivering Toyota ads to each other.

I’m okay with there being a stick of Degree For Men label out in Sheriff Carter’s bathroom, or if the cast of Bones drive Toyotas. But when they stop to talk about long lasting anti-wetness or zero percent APR financing I’m fucking done.

That’s exactly what I was referencing. They pissed off Sony by working with Phillips on the CD-i. Hilarious.

Man I haven’t heard the name RocketBoom in so long. Wonder what ever happened to MeMe Molly?

The Engineer Guy just stopped uploading.

Same with Afrotechmods. TOP NOTCH electronics tutorial videos, he just stopped posting.

Pushing Up Roses, as she explained it herself, has pretty much said what she wanted to say about retro video games and largely does TV now with the occasional modern adventure game review thrown in. I wish her well but I’m no longer her audience.

DistroTube. Did Linux related content who might have an 88 tattooed on his neck by now.

Scott Manley. Similar to PUR, the content he makes kind of drifted out from under my interests; I became a fan of his Kerbal Space Program playthroughs and demonstrations of space flight concepts, but as far as I know now he basically does space news stuff now, which is perfectly cool but my attention wandered elsewhere.

Bright Sun Films. Once again there wasn’t a “nope not watching this anymore” moment, I think I just had my fill of Abandoned.

(dis)Honorable Mention: The Escapist. I no longer watch that channel but I am still a fan, viewer and patron of the talent themselves. Their new channel Second Wind is the most hilarious instance of owning the means of production I’ve ever seen.

The Modern Rogue certainly had a heyday. Past tense.

You know what’s funny? Nintendo put expansion slots on the bottom of all of their consoles prior to the Wii. In Japan, they were used for the Famicom Disk System, the Satellaview, the N64DD and the Gameboy Player. The latter was the only one that made it to the West. They never released an expansion for a console outside of Asia. They even had to retool several games that were released on Famicom diskettes for cartridges in the West, including inventing on-cartridge save files via battery-backed RAM for The Legend of Zelda in order to release them in the West.

Given Sega’s track record with console expansions, Nintendo might have been just as well off. Well, except for how the SNES optical drive add-on played out.

A Dell Inspiron laptop.

It just kept dying. Typing a Word document one moment, black screen the next. I bought this thing in August because I was going back to school and I needed a new laptop. By December I finally convinced them to replace the machine outright. I got a different model that lacked a lot of the features I had ordered.

I’m no longer a Dell customer.

I am completely done with the “male character says something chauvanistic, female character slaps, that’s the joke.”

Futurama did it quite a lot, Leela hit Fry a lot, Amy hit him a few times. I done with shows that do that. I see that joke happen again I’ll stop the playback right then and there and cancel whatever service I’m watching it on.

A mix of grains consisting of not less than 51% corn, water, yeast and oak. That’s what you need to make bourbon.

No, APT is the past 20 years.

Yeah I referenced Clickspring, when oxidizing a part for decorative purposes he would put the part in a brass tray full of brass shavings apparently to function as a thermal mass so that the color comes out evenly.

To expand on this, the rainbow of colors which start at a straw then turn yellow, red, brown and then that vivid blue, are caused by refraction. The oxide layer on the surface is transparent or translucent, and the thickness of the layer determines what wavelength of light it scatters. The hotter it gets, the thicker the oxide layer forms, so you can fairly reliably tell the temperature the metal has been heated to by eye, and you might use different amounts of heating to achieve hard-but-brittle or soft-but-tough.

I’ve even seen it done by Chris of Youtube channel Clickspring for decorative purposes. It’s how he made the steel hardware of his brass clock blue.

Exactly how you temper something the size of a sword using a forge is a bit outside my understanding; I’ve done it with relatively small bits of drill rod to make lathe tools with a gas torch, but that’s about it.

And after the war he went on to become an early pioneer in surfing!

I generally mourn actual Hardee’s. There were several things i miss from their menu pre-Carl’s Jr.

Could you imagine the litter box that thing needs?