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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: February 2nd, 2024

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  • White maple is my go-to for projects I want to keep. I love how clean it is and the large curvy grain patterns. Titanium bits and saw blades help and getting your saw blade sharpened after a couple of large projects is a good idea but you’re going to be burning through it a lot of the time even with high quality brand new cutting tools. I leave an 8th extra on and bring it down with a belt sander to deal with the burn marks. Downsize drill bits by one size and use a file for holes that you will be able to see into.

    If you use reclaimed wood don’t assume all of the metal has been removed. Sometimes nails and screws break instead of working out and that can be easy to miss especially for someone checking a large amount of wood. If a saw blade hits a nail you potentially have a very dangerous projectile. Run a magnet over the wood while you’re marking your cuts to make sure. If you’re going to be working with reclaimed wood a lot a wand style metal detector is a good investment.


  • Pecan is pretty dense so it will stand up to the elements better than most woods. It will require a good moisture barrier that should be regularly reapplied because water is outdoor wood’s biggest weakness and if you use something with a UV protection added that will help.

    I wouldn’t use Pecan for outdoor furniture. No wood will stand up to the elements in the long term and you’ll be doing lots of refinishing which is easier with a less dense wood. I like cedar or a furniture grade pine for outdoor projects. Cedar is exceptional at resisting moisture damage and they are both relatively cheap and easy to sand and refinish. Plus they are lighter and outdoor furniture gets moved around more. I save better woods and especially visually interesting woods like pecan for projects that I will give to someone or that I can pass down.

    Edit: somehow moisture became moisturizer in the second sentence, edited to fix that.


  • Nolan’s got nothing on Tim Burton. Batman Returns was the darkest live action Batman we’ve gotten so far. Expecting it to be more serious like the two Burton movies that preceded it was a big part of it’s negative reception when it came out. It’s easier to split the series between the Burton led as good as live action Batman gets first 2 movies and the family friendly second 2 movies when you’re looking back on them than it was as they were being released. I also really like it though. I especially appreciated “Holy rusted metal, Batman!”


  • I don’t know but the most compelling evidence in my mind is the personal stories from Macaulay Culkin. Culkin was about as broken as Michael Jackson for similar reasons and I think they had a legitimate bond because of that. I tend to believe Culkin when he says that Jackson’s odd behaviors were not a result of ill intent and that Jackson didn’t hurt children.


  • She did something about the system. She defended it. On two occasions she opposed the release of people who had convictions overturned by demonstrating actual innocence to appellate courts on the basis of legal technicalities, in both cases her office argued that they had waited too long to file a petition to be released. Her office argued against the release of inmates eligible for parole after a federal court ruled that the extreme overcrowding in California prisons was cruel and unusual on the basis that releasing the prisoners would reduce prison labor.

    She helped with a cover up of an employee at the state crime lab who falsified testing results. The truth came out after the employee was arrested for stealing drugs from the lab and hundreds of convictions were overturned. She defended a police detective that falsified a confession to coerce a defendant into accepting a plea deal. She opposed requiring police to use body worn cameras. She opposed legislation that would have required her office to review police shootings.

    She consistently declined to investigate allegations of police and prosecutor misconduct including police shootings of unarmed people. Eventually she had to for the police, it got to the point that the justice department eventually stepped in to investigate an incident where a group of officers surrounded a mentally ill man with a steak knife and shot him 21 times after Harris refused to review the case. While she cooperated with the federal investigation into the police shooting, she backed the prosecutor who had his entire office removed from a case because of proven misconduct including hiding exonerating evidence.










  • We used to have laws that decentralized control of media. An entity could only own a certain number of newspapers, tv stations, or radio stations. There were incentives for smaller news companies to insure that there was competition in each market. Congress kept chipping away at those laws letting larger companies buy up more and more of the market, allowing mergers that restricted competition. Now radio is nearly a monopoly, TV and newspapers are oligarchies. The Internet fell into an oligarchy disturbingly quickly.

    The only way to get the media serving the people again is to break up the big companies and restore the guardrails that protected and supported small local companies.