Process X: Model Train Making Process. A 73-year-old Japanese artisan crafting model trains for decades. Inami Railway Model Works.
Secret Base: The History of Slipping on Banana Peels [33min].
Angela Collier: The sham legacy of Richard Feynman [2hr 48min].
I have updated my auction-processing program to work with an auctionary house’s new api (the old api is being deprecated at the end of the year). They also recently made a change in the quality of matches given for your search strings. This is day two of production with the new api, and I was greeted by this collage of “vintage german hand blown rocker glass doll eyes brown” though my search term in this case consisted of -none- of these words.
My search term included “chocolate.” “Chocolate” is close to “brown,” sayeth the algorithm. Here are two dozen scary doll eyes on stalks. I could have given you actual matching guesses, I just thought maybe you would like the disembodied eye pairs more.
I don’t know why anyone would find this sort of awful seemingly-random guesswork to be helpful in any manner whatsoever.
Finally, a website for my generation
Huhn Starch System ad. The Manufacturing Confectioner (1927apr, pg 25).
Song Exploder: Le Tigre “Deceptacon"
Linus Boman: This hidden Swedish design is very mindful.
Grand Forks Herald, 1920 June 11. “Hey hey whoa ... you know, actually, cancel my order ...”
Hello I have updated the strips page with the 2023/2024 strips. It took me this long to find a working solution which did not charge money and also was not brute force/overly annoying. I am providing the solution below, if you need to make small versions of a website in a somewhat similar manner.
First, get a snapshot program ready. I am using Clockmix, a program I wrote that does timed snapshots (you will have to find something else). The default is every two seconds. Great. Now load up the website page in your favorite browser. Hit F11 to make it full screen. In my case, 1920x1080. Now F12 to pull up the website inspector. Move the box to a different screen if you can. Start your snapshot program, and paste this into the inspector command line:
setInterval(function(){ window.scrollBy(0,1080); }, 2000);
This will move the screen 1080 pixels “down” every two seconds. Hit enter, whoosh, you’re off to the races. Go get a third cup of coffee, come back. You have many screenshots now that can be stitched together. I use Irfanview, which unfortunately has a 65XXX pixel limit. For 1080, that’s 60 images max. So tear off 60, push them into the Irfanview panorama stitch, save it off. Irfanview is not good at image resizing. I use a different program for that (and to trim the scrollbars off, so 1920px becomes 1900px). I resize the 1920x(whatever) images to 186x(whatever). Rinse, repeat. Then take all of those images back into Irfanview, stitch them together, save file, you’re all set.
Not a one-click solution but also free.
Back in the time before time, farmers looking to get away from the exorbitant cost of telephone infrastructure would just clip onto extant barb wire fences. A 1965 episode of Petticoat Junction used this as a plot device in which “Uncle Joe” creates his own barb wire fence telephone system. The clip below will start at the beginning of the barb wire fence telephone sales presentation so you can best evaluate for yourself the advantages and disadvantages of using said system in your own personal lifestyle ... system.
“I am a barbed-wire fence.”
1935 Anglo-American Chewing Gum Ltd.: Kidnapped (Thriller Chewing Gum) #36.
they used a cheetah for distraction
it was a thing in the early-mid 1900s
Japanese Kitchen Tour: The Amazing Story of a Man Who Sold Pound Cakes by Bicycle for 30 Years ア・ラモート.
“Live each day desperately.”
I found a recent study on the internet of value that listed several key components of intelligence and at what age these factors “peaked.”
A lot of them were in the late 20s.
I left it open for awhile. Thought about taking a screen shot of the listing of the attributes.
Then I immediately closed the tab. My brain, though in steep decline during the Waning Years, is very self-protective.
Aubrey Plaza vs. Patti LuPone | Hot Ones Versus
Why NYC’s Grand Central is So Hard to Build Around ‒ Walking Tour ‒ Architectural Digest.
TLDW: Elevators need “elevator pits” for sleeping and mating purposes. The Grand Central station area is, oddly enough, infested with train lines below the surface because ground-level NYC real estate is very very very valuable indeed. Solution? Staircases so everyone has to climb one level to get to the elevators, or position the shafts between the train lines so the pits are all snug: line, shaft, line, shaft, line. A problem I was unaware of until I watched this video production, shown above.
[FX: weeks of sleepless nights, tossing and turning] the ... PITS ... oh god ... pits ...
Cabel Sasser, Panic ‒ XOXO Festival (2024).
Do not sleep on this one. It pays out, pays out, pays out, pays out.
Jon Stewart On How Tech Companies Are Changing Entertainment / Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend.
Bike ride #3X-4X. I haven’t been riding as much, the novelty has worn off and just getting “out” of this area to places that are “nice” to ride is a pain. A freeway cuts off access to the bay in a horrible, insistent manner. Miles of Not Getting Across Me. Traffic continues to traffic. Today got almost-brushed by a school bus. Two weeks ago, was riding along a generous two-lane parking lot service drive next to a fast food dump and the person following slowly behind. No one else on the road. I stopped, they stopped. In a parking lot. No one is around. The car is twenty feet behind me. I have my foot on the curb. I’m not going anywhere. Let’s see how long this lasts. Waiting ... waiting. After a minute I got bored and pulled into the fast food place so they could continue on their way unimpeded by my arrogance. Have the bicyclists coined a term for this? Over-courtesy? Cars, in general, usually pull some sort of boner around three times per each biking trip. Which is about the same as when I was driving. Difference now is the sometimes the boner is that the driver has to SLAM on the brakes to avoid hitting me (there’s only been one time I didn’t have the situation under control, it was that asshole who gunned it through the Seabreeze dirt parking lot because his small penis needed an off-road workout [PENIS: “It’s dirt, dumbass, HIT THE GAS” CLOWNASS: “You got it, junior-junior YEEEEEHAWWWWWOH SHITTT”]). Though, as mentioned before, my favorite people are the oblivious ones, who either go the distance not even realizing I’m right next to them, or are startled after they’ve passed me. My post-glow go-to these days is to yell out that I love them. Because I do. I love all people. Did that sound convincing? Hold on, let me warm up a bit. I lOvEEEEE all pEoPLLE Anyway, a novel about a bicyclist who kills errant drivers would be a best-seller, I think. The bicyclist would not have to go to prison, just like all the drivers that kill pedestrians/bicyclists. “Golly, I killed a family! Hrm, what’s for lunch.” Laws: sensical, fair.
My bike lights and reflectors arrived, so I happily pitched the old light. It’s not going to serve anyone any function whatsoever. The new front bike light arrived with a rusted port and died w/in a week or two. The two rear lights are still happy and bright. I had to make a wooden mount for one of them, the second fit right into the slot of the old bike light.
Got a bunch of valves and adapters, though that’s pretty pointless until I have some sort of road bike pump that I can use. The hand pump I have is not going to pump to 80psi, pretty sure.
The bell is ringing w/the littlest of bumps now. I pulled it off to take it apart and there’s no clear way to open it up. Another vote for buying a new bell with a good ringy-dingy. Let me just order my dream bell, I pointed to it earlier in the year. Bell USD13, shipping USD54. Hrm no, I’m allergic to spending more on shipping than product. My dream bell is just a dream. [later] Now the bell doesn’t ring randomly. Dunno.
The city of El Cerrito has a restroom key thing wherein you give them $25 and they give you a restroom key. There are ~12 or so keyed restrooms in city buildings, scattered about, like a poopin’ treasure hunt. So I bought a key. You get your money back, apparently. They didn’t give me a receipt; having the key is good enough for them. I have paid attention to “government” for decades now and I posit that they will somehow “fuck this up” when I try to get my money back years from now.
In GTA news, Rockstar is enduring DDOS attacks from whiny modders who can’t cheat in the game any more for the most part and/or whiny mod sellers who can’t profit from selling mods any more. Again, for the most part. It’s not a single event, more like an argument over weeks/months. I need to find/make a crew before I decide to chuck it again for a year or so. Occasionally going up to the roof of “my” “office” to snipe at griefers is entertaining, but it’s not game sustenance.
Rockstar still hasn’t taken ONE damn step to block messages from people advertising level-unlocks/modded billionaire accounts etc. You’d think that would be high on their list, because those accounts are taking morsels off of Rockstar’s HEAPING plate of cash. I don’t know, they move in a bizarre fashion and basically don’t have a PR division. The one thing to always remember is that they farm out DLCs and etc to different countries/divisions, so every damn time the UI is inconsistent, the game objectives are inconsistent, everything is different. Each division is reluctant to touch any other division’s code. Additionally, they have no clue what future-proofing is. “We made a gun locker that stores all your guns!” [FX: months later new guns are added to the game] Gun locker: “I don’t know what those guns are” Ten years of this.
Now that modders are ~90% gone, hanging out in public lobbies is again a thing. So I’m being re-introduced to GTA Player Mental Acuity. I was talking with a crew member, one of the only ones that shows up on the regular, and we were hashing out the frequency of players who would kill you, then you’d kill them back and they’d say “why?” and you’d say “well, considering everything, I think it has a lot to do with when you killed me first unprovoked, five minutes ago” and they’d say “What? Whut? I didn’t kill you.” This happens a lot. Is there something in the young child’s brain that suppresses memories? It happens so much I don’t think it’s just kids telling porkies. You’re young, you can’t remember anything, you’re old, you can’t remember anything. The sweet spot is 25-39, I think. 25, you can rent cars and crash them into buildings and you’re also good at fuckin’, if you (you personally, not “you” as in “people”) actually have the ability to get good at fuckin’.. You hit 40, your ranking on any dating profile auto-nosedives and the memory starts going. Find a steady someone by age 39.99973 at most.
