Seán T. McBeth 🍻📷

The clay is now the consistency of... IDK, clay. I was worried I wouldn't be able to recover all of it, that it would get stuck to the terra cotta, but some rubbing with the clay ball itself picked it all right up.

Still not sure how to scale this, but this feels much less gritty.

The comments are even worse. Straight up bizzaro land.

"My dad was going to take a position at the Pentagon but he was too scared of DC, a completely different town with a ducking river in the way"

*Where* in Virginia? Like, Leesburg or something?

Yeah, I'd like to try pottery someday

<Grumbles in Having To Do Things The Hard Way>

The place in Philly was mostly just a club. We rented a space and stored our tools there and it was all ran just to have a place to hang out and make things. These places I see today are way too commercial.

I wish I could get a setup going like I had back in Philly. We had a hacker space there, but not like all the places you actually see calling themselves "hacker spaces" but are actually just gym memberships to shop class. It's too expensive and I can't find enough serious people here in the DMV.

There is a commercial forge that runs night time classes nearish me. A buddy and I went; he had done it once before with his son. It was a ton of fun.

I, uh, may have already bought most of what I need to build my own forge.

It also feels much more substantial than it actually is. I'm not the world's fastest reader, but I still got through 1/3rd of it in about 30 minutes.

It came highly recommended by someone here on Bluesky as a good beginners book. I guess that's technically true, if you're so much of a beginner you've never even heard the term "forging". I feel like you'd get all this just from the YouTube rabbit hole we all went down that got us into this idea.

This book is strictly informational, not instructional. It's also rather poorly edited; very full of typos and odd sentence construction. Several times I have turned the page to feel like a page is missing because I can't tell if the last half of a sentence actually finished the first from prev page

Simpsons meme: IS MY DIRECTED ACYCLIC GRAPH AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION OF A COMPLEX REALITY? NO: IT IS REALITY THAT IS WRONG

Not quite thick enough but the color is right

"Blacksmith: Apprentice to Master" by Alex Pole

New book

The clay is now the consistency of yogurt. Doesn't taste like it though. Might spread out on some parchment.

I don’t want to watch your post-apocalyptic TV show unless the women have hairy armpits.

My kids are away at camp for the week and... I'm so jealous. The place has a huge lake. All kinds of activities. I wanna take a week off and have someone curate activities for me. But when you do that as an adult, it costs an order of magnitude more. I would really be fine with the same kid games.

What is Dubai chocolate? I saw it next to the cash register at 7-Eleven the other day.

On 2: most of the algorithms aren't that hard. Where the real work comes in is optimization. For that, you mostly just need to track the set of nodes you've already visited so you don't do it again. Here there be stack overflows.

On 1: it doesn't matter how you slice it, you need to be visible to and liked by as many people as possible. You need leadership to know you were responsible for something you did. You need your peers to know they can count on you. You need those fuckers in IT to think you're on their side.

If you are a young software developer, trying to figure out your way in life, I have two pieces of advise for you:

1) make nice with everyone around you. This job is more about people than code.

2) git gud at manipulating trees and graphs. People will think you're a wizard. They come up so often.

There's something that bugs me about FLW's design philosophy, though: it only works if you have FLW building you a new home.

After visiting many of his works, marveling at his ethos, even doing a design retreat at Falling Water, I've come to realize a lot of it is just fetishization.

I don't know the game but there were a few that were shiny, so I'm thinking we need to have a lesson on understanding market rates.

Thanks man, that means a lot to me. Process is the best part.

New anxiety trigger just unlocked: how my children manage their trading cards.

Added more clay from another experiment and moved it outside. Obviously, it's drying out faster in the heat than in my basement. Should have thought of that earlier.

Somebody on LinkedIn said what we're all thinking.

I'm never going to get this shit hole cleaned up. There isn't enough room to put all the shit away in their own little shit boxes so I can find my shit again.

Please plastic band straps are always falling off when I'm trying to carry the bundle to the cash register

I wish @woodcraft.bsky.social wouldn't do this. Stickers on wood are a gigantic pain in the ass. Give them a few wraps of cellophane and our the sticker on the cellophane. It would also good the kit together better than the plastic band straps they use.

I don't understand why people put so much effort into trying to get someone else's computer to run their shell scripts, effort made harder because I don't understand why CI servers make running a bunch of glorified shell scripts so hard.