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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • I don’t think I have anything to recommend that isn’t a fairly common home tool in the U.S.

    Nice sets of metric and imperial wrenches, and at least one adjustable crescent wrench. You’ll use the wrenches all the time, and at a basic level you can get away with just an adjustable crescent wrench. Fixed wrenches are much nicer to use, and it’s super useful to be able to use a fixed wrench and the adjustable wrench for those bolts where neither end is fixed.

    A flat pry bar. It’s definitely not necessary, but I find them really helpful. It’s much easier to remove nails than the claw on a hammer, and it’s really helpful for applying leverage in a variety of situations.

    A circular saw, chop saw, or table saw. A powered saw is another extremely helpful tool, but you don’t need all three of these. Most people should pick one and I’d prioritize them for in this order.

    Random orbit sander. Sanding by hand takes forever and it just sucks. If you use it even once it will have been worth the purchase.

    Battery powered shop lights, from whatever brand you’ve bought power tools from. Having a handful of lights you can move to anyplace you need them is really helpful. I think every tool maker these days also makes something like this, just buy the ones you already have batteries for.

    Shopvac. Immensely helpful for cleaning up the dust and crap created whenever you working on the house. You can integrate them into most of your power tools (might need some adapters) so that you’re working cleaner, and you won’t burn it out like you could with a household vacuum.



  • I don’t recall the specific circumstances, it was something along the lines of having my hands full and trying to take things in from the car.

    Has this really never happened to you or anyone you know? It’s not exactly common, but it’s happened to most people at one time or another. I suppose this is probably a generational thing, and harder to do with modern cars.












  • I can be a hobby dilettante, so there’s a lot I could list.

    Technology and personal computers is probably the biggest one. I used to work in IT and as a hobby had a few computers at home running different flavors of linux for different purposes. I was a big technology enthusiast in general. These days I maintain a basic level of knowledge and awareness because I feel like I have to. I would happily give it all up if I could.

    I also follow Magic the Gathering developments despite not buying cards in decades and it’s been about a year since I played Arena (the free online version of MTG). The rules and card interactions are still really interesting, but I just can’t be bothered to play. I’ve thought more than once about applying to be a judge for MTG tournaments.



  • Martian Time-Slip by Philip K Dick - PKD is always pretty weird, but I found this one especially so. Time travel experiments by unlikable characters that involves abusing schizophrenic and autistic children.

    Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie - First of the Imperial Radch series. Told from the perspective of an intelligence that’s truly different than ours (even though it is ostensibly human). It made a lot of waves for having genderless characters, but that only scratches the surface of how strangely the narrator relates to the humans they’re dealing with.

    Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer - First of the Southern Reach series. A group of 4 unnamed individuals go to investigate a reality distorting phenomenon and reality gets heavily distorted. This one declares right up front that it’s going to get strange and does exactly that.