I helped a former girlfriend move out of her apartment years ago. I brought along a tub of spackling paste to fill the nail holes she’d left in the wall (it was even the kind that goes on pink and then dries white, which is pretty handy). She was mind=blown as she’d never seen anything like it before. I asked her how she filled nail holes and she said she used chewing gum and white-out.

He helped prevent DECADES of conservative damage.

Meh, right-wing talking heads like him are a dime a dozen. The real power is in the media that feature them.

I’m still not fully sure who he was. 3 days ago, I’d never heard the name.

I knew there was some guy who was being parodied for his tiny face, but that was it.

I own a house built in 1942 and it’s insane how good-quality the 2x4s are – perfectly straight and true and no knots on them anywhere. They’re so good that I’ve reused them for railings on my stairs. And this house was built as very cheap temporary worker housing during the war! I find it hilarious how much better the construction quality is on my house than on these million-dollar cardboard mcmansions they’re building these days.

I don’t think this is true. There was a transitional period around the 1940s where 2x4s were 1.75" x 3.75", and that wasn’t because wood shrunk half as much as it does today.

I need to get a shrink tape ruler like this. I own a skoolie (used school bus converted to a motorhome) which is 35’ 4" long from bumper-to-bumper. A lot of campsites have rules where RVs can’t be longer than 35’. My thought was to get a tape measure with feet just slightly longer than normal and use it to make my bus appear to be shorter than 35’.

I’ve worked on a lot of pre-1900 houses (I even grew up in one) and the 2x4s from back then really were 2" x 4" instead of the modern 1.5" x 3.5". Two years ago I bought a house built in 1942 and I demolished one interior wall and re-used the studs from it to build some new walls. I kept building these walls 1/2" too tall even though I measured and re-measured the spaces I was putting them into very carefully. I eventually realized that these 1942 studs were not in fact 1.5" x 3.5" like I had been assuming, but were actually 1.75" x 3.75" (the extra 1/4" in width of the top and bottom plates of my walls is where the phantom extra 1/2" was coming from). So apparently there was a transitional period between the real 2" x 4" 2x4s and the 1.5" x 3.5" ones.

I discovered another weird transitional thing in this house. The old houses I worked on all had lath-and-plaster walls, with strips of rough wood lath covered with a thick rough plaster layer which was in turn covered with a thin smooth plaster layer. Modern houses of course use sheetrock, but my 1942 house covered the bare studs with 16" x 16" pre-formed interlocking blocks of 1" thick rough plaster, and then smooth plaster was laid over these blocks. I first encountered these when tearing down the ceiling in my kitchen, and these things were unbelievably fucking heavy. They basically weighed as much as solid stone of these dimensions, and I can’t imagine what it must have been like to install them initially. It surely must have been a two-man job.

Edit: another fun experience I had was renovating an Atlanta house that had been built in 1843. When we tore down the original lath-and-plaster walls, we found embedded in every single wall and ceiling a single dead, flattened rat. That house must have stunk to high fucking hell when they first moved into it. I like to imagine that it had been built with slave labor and this was some well-deserved payback.

TIL

I’m always amused whenever I see a company advertise itself as “family-owned”. Every family-owned company I’ve ever worked for has been run by a competent but morally bankrupt founder and his dirt-stupid but morally bankrupt children.

My favorite one of these was a company that imploded because the founder was banging his son’s wife (who was also the mother of his grandchildren). This was considered unremarkable in Louisiana.

I saw one great-looking job posting, it even listed all the professional skills I happen to have. Then I saw the company name: Palantir. GOD DAMN IT.

I think maybe I will just stick with hyphens so nobody thinks I’m a chatbot.

I can never decide whether to use a hyphen or a semicolon; I’m sure there are rules for it but I don’t know them. Usually I just use whichever one I didn’t just use in the previous sentence - seems to work pretty well.

I have no chickens.

I found out the day of the concert that Dethklok and Baby Metal were playing in my city but I couldn’t make it. I’ve like Brendon Smalls since Home Movies.

I think it’s funny that Dethklok is both a parody metal band and one of the best metal bands around. I don’t even really like metal and I love Dethklok.

Employee make line go down. AI make line go up.

“Yo dog, I heard you like freedom so I gave you freedom from your freedom!”

“Fuck you, Microsoft.” -Everyone, at all times

Eh, that game where you had two gorillas standing on buildings lobbing exploding bananas at each other was pretty cool.

In my first professional programming job writing custom software for clients in 1995, one of our standard sales pitches to clients was the idea that a GUI-based application would do away with the need for command prompts. This was always met with applause and great rejoicing. It’s kind of remarkable that command prompts are still going strong thirty years later. I’m sure nobody would appreciate having this phenomenon compared to the Amish so I won’t do it. But I think it’s pretty cool that the Amish are still around doing their thing.

Anybody know the legalese for “because they’re lying buckets of shit”?