eanholt

[eanholt]

Tell me about nonprofit financial management, though. I'm probably headed toward being involved in that for 2 different ones, because I make choices with my life.

me talking to the tank of beetles

"You guys don't have to know anything about nonprofit financial management. I envy that."

[eanholt]

These are a holiday tradition for me, after making Alton Brown's Aged Egg Nog, which is boozy and delicious and uses a dozen egg yolks.

I do not make it through all 12 egg whites, that makes so many of these little guys. I suppose I could make less booze, but that would require me to remember how many meringues that was last year.

If you've ever looked at a bit of crumbling drywall and gone "boy am I hungry right now" then meringues are the recipe for you. They're simultaneously very simple and very finnicky, but if you can get the hang of them then you can experience eating chalk (but sweet!) whenever you want, with none of the limestone content involved in eating real chalk. A batch of meringues is just 3 egg whites, (at ROOM TEMPERATURE) 1/8th teaspoon cream of tartar, 3/4 cups regular white granulated sugar, and a half teaspoon of vanilla extract. (or you could do a different flavor, if you like your conkrete to be fancy. I do not. I am here to experience texture with minimal flavor.)

You combine all the ingredients but the sugar in a mixer with a whisk attachment, and whisk at high speed until soft peaks form. Then slowly sift in the granulated sugar, whisking as you go. Once all the sugar is whisked in, keep mixing for another five minutes--the mix should be glossy and sleek, not dry.

Then pipe the cookies onto a parchment-lined pan, about two inches across, leaving an inch of space between. If you have fancy frosting tips and a piping bag, use them. Bafflingly, I do not have those (why? what have I been doing with my life that I own three machetes but not frosting tips?) so I just used a gallon ziplock with a hole poked into it and made beautiful little angel turd shapes.

They bake at 200 F for 45 minutes, and then should be allowed to rest in the oven for another half hour with the temperature off. Don't open the oven while they bake! Let them cool completely, and then you can eat something that has both the visual look and the mouth-feel of a packing peanut.

I love these things. I'll post an out-of-oven picture when they're done in like an hour.

[eanholt]

He would drill so many things, none of which are appropriate to use a drill on.

new animal just dropped

[eanholt]

This is the big thing I do to take care of others. Get started. If you keep it up for, say, 13 years, "I bought some bed nets!" turns into "I saved approximately N lives of children who would have died without me specifically, but who get to have a fairly normal life expectancy instead."

What N would shock you to learn that you later exceeded as your impact on the world in your lifetime? I passed mine long ago.

You Can Buy A Malaria Net

[eanholt]

Thank you. You got me back into my little workshop today. I've had this obsidian cab I made for a friend before she passed (fuck cancer), and I never got a chance to make a full piece of jewelry out of it for her. I wanted to finish the project, though, and to make a thing to remember her by.

Today I used the bevel grinding jig I made earlier this summer to regrind its girdle (lesson learned: I can't eyeball a good girdle angle yet), and started on making an open backed bezel to hold it. I soldered the bezel strip, which is a nice snug fit, but then my ring for the back ended up not being a snug fit in that so it wouldn't solder right Another lesson in dry fitting and sneaking up on your line instead of just cutting to measurement, I guess. I think if I flatten it a bit it might stretch out to be a good fit for soldering. Or it'll be yet another lesson and I'll make another one.

I've had some ugh field around this hobby after a few setbacks, but this was a good thing to do with today.

And I also had a good talk with my wife about whether a board I'm looking at joining gets at what feels important to me in light of recent events, and my conclusion is that I want to do it and more.

Hey, also, all the anarchist shit aside, tomorrow I want you to make something.

I forced myself to draw something after the 2016 election. I forced myself to draw something when my mother died in 2018. I forced myself to draw something when my spouse was hospitalized for multiple organ failure in 2021.

When you are miserable, make something. Add a row to your project, bake a box cake, draw on a sheet of lined paper, write a poem on a napkin, fold an origami shirt out of a dollar bill, make your favorite recipe for dinner, but make something with your hands, something that you can hold and look at engage your senses in.

It won't fix the world, but it will change the world. You will have made something that didn't exist before. You will have impacted your reality, even in a very small way. And it is going to be something you made *after.* Something bad happened, something shook you, and you made something after, in spite of it.

[eanholt]

Please consistently dress them in different primary colors or something. I'm hopeless.

proud to say that I have never once in my life figured out the whodunit in any crime story I've read or watched. I just let the facts and clues wash over me, absorbing absolutely none of it. I am the audience they think of when they throw in red herrings, in case you've ever wondered "who would fall for this obvious false lead". it's me. I am the idiot viewer/reader. not once has an obviously framed clue revealed anything to me. my head is completely empty when I consume these stories.

[eanholt]

My wife got paid to write those for a bit. At least one person got trained by her OSHA course, and it stuck with them, and it was her.

[eanholt]

A what?

[eanholt]

That's why we like it.

Thanks for recommending me folk punk everyone. It sucks 💜

[eanholt]

"Pfff. GameStop hodlers with their 'to the moon'. Whatever. We're going to the sun."

me when I understand visual symbolism

[eanholt]

Chapter 6, huh? Those design notes are incredible.

(so is the art. Great choice for the cover).

bro did boeing design this spaceship why is EVERYTHING broken??? fanart for time to orbit: unknown by @derinthescarletpescatarian

god the attention to detail and creativity put into the futuristic technology is astounding. my favourite detail is how the ship creates artificial gravity through centrifugal force. (get inside the Giant Washing Machine future space colonists! it's perfectly safe and very functional!) design notes:

I'm only on chapter 6 rn but this is what aspen looks like in my head.

the vibe im going for is borderline cosmic horror. aspen greaves' face opens up to reveal Spaceship Guts inside. i decided to combine aspen with the s.s. courageous to make them one organism (Courageous-Aspen) to symbolise how the colonists' survival are totally dependant on their malfunctioning ship. it's also a cool way to show the weight of loneliness and responsibility weighing on aspen e.g. the ship is constantly on their mind, even as they're barely holding themself together.

mini!aspen is on a spacewalk looking at big!aspen. something something, existential angst about realising how vulnerable and insignificant you are in the vast uncaring void of space.

Wips:

not a lot of revisions between draft and lineart. my only big change was making the aspen's eyelines match up, so they are looking at themselves. oh fun fact! the plain black background was actually a merging error, i originally had stars but the layers got deleted and i ended up keeping it like that because it looks SO cool and bleak.

[eanholt]

Guess what I just got back from the studio!!!! It's Narcissus!

I did not expect this bowl to be so cool, I'm kind of obsessed

[eanholt]

For draining, I would probably use something like:

Even if you don't have a hole saw, if it's just a Rubbermaid tub or something I bet you could draw the circle and cut it out with a razor blade and some persistence. Make sure the seal is on a fully flat area of the tub or it'll be a pain to get it to really seal (I'm shaking my fist at my rock saw manufacturer here). Since it isn't flush with the bottom this does mean you don't get to drain it dry -- not sure how important thoroughness is on the water swap. Still got to get some 6" tub as the catch basin, though.

Lights: our good friend has a dining room with an array of grow lights on shelves, and with just a bit of reflector around the light arrays themselves, we only really notice the lights when the timer turns them on/off. A fireplace seems more unobtrusive. Sensitivity may vary, though.

My estimate would be that the fireplace doesn't care at all about the level of moisture you're talking about here. But if you really want to try to reduce humidity transfer and make spills mop-upable you might go look at the big box store for some class 1 (stronger) or class 2 (weaker) vapor barrier sheeting, and an associated vapor barrier tape. Attach it in the surrounding area somehow, then tape across the seams and any fasteners that punctured it. It won't make a waterproof enclosure, but I think this might be what you're looking for.

I have a goal of turning this fireplace into a wintertime hydroponic herb garden. Mostly for basil but if I'm putting in this effort I'll try other stuff too, why not.

I need to do a lot more reading and research, but my first picture of what this might look like comes from a 10 year old reddit post here with pictures here (but also posting them in this post:)

Ideally I'd like something a little... nicer looking? But I don't want it to be too expensive. We'll see what I find in my continued searching.

Basically, plastic tub filled with water, with slots for plant pots; aquarium pump for circulating the water; bright-ass grow lights on a timer. Change the water once a week and add nutrience. Honestly a lot simpler than I would have expected. I want to find out if there's been any great leaps forward in the past 10 years though. Seems likely.

Thoughts so far:

My initial thought was to build the thing into the fireplace itself but that is way worse than having it self contained and merely placed in the fireplace, especially now that I've realized hydroponics is the way to go. The lights might be a little bit built into the top

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Changing the water:

This is the bit I most want ideas for, if anything comes to mind pls give me your thoughts

Changing the water is going to be annoying if I don't plan for it. Messy and yucky and lots of steps and precarious with high risk of spilling water all over the carpet. Wanna reduce these things as much as possible. I would really like it to be as easy as possible to do, that feels like the kind of chore I would come to dread and then put off.

I am thinking about whether I could do this with siphoning, with a little length of rubber hose? When I helped my mom with her winemaking kit it seemed very easy, but also I won't have as much room to make gravity work with me here. Refilling this way seems like it would be easy enough, I can just use a gallon jug or something and set it on a chair for height, but emptying.... The fireplace sits about 6 inches off the floor, and given the limited space to work with I won't want the plants sitting any higher than necessary. Not a lot of wiggle room. I would love ideas about this. Maybe there's a whole different approach I'm not thinking of?

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Temperature:

Given that this is for the wintertime, and in a fireplace no less, temperature is going to be a concern. The plant nursery I used to work at used heat mats for the seedlings, maybe something like that could work? I don't know how different the needs are for plants when there's no soil involved. Actually if I'm DIY-ing this, there's lots of aquarium pumps with heaters built in, would that be viable? Too warm? Bit point I need to research.

Door:

The fireplace doesn't have a real door, just these metal mesh curtains, which I expect to be useless for my purposes, and probably they will actively get in the way. I will want some kind of actual door on the fireplace if I want to have any control of temperature and humidity.

Also at some point there will be a cat, I intend to adopt a cat as soon as I meet the right cat, so we will want it protected from their depredations as well.

Additionally, a light-blocking door. Grow lights are BRIGHT and they are on for like 16 hours a day. I don't want to only have the light-blocking door though because I want to be able to enjoy gazing at my lil plants.

These "doors" are more likely to be plastic rectangles that are jammed in there or something. Whatever.

Space:

The Fireplace is about 16 inches deep, and about 20 inches wide at the narrowest point. Height is a bit complicated because of the flue handle (second picture) but call it just barely 20 inches at the most restrictive point in the center, and then more space all around (that almost certainly can't be used but whatever).

In theory I could put the lights up into the space around that handle, and have a bit more vertical space to work with, but I think actually getting them secure any higher than the 20" is likely to be really tricky and bad. Nothing to attach to up there other than the handle itself, and hooo boy I do not want to accidentally open the flue lmao.

Speaking of:

Lights:

This feels like the easy part. LEDs are a game changer, I don't expect it to be too hard to get decent lights at a decent price for this. Maybe I'm wrong and grow lights are weird and fucky? I will still have to figure out how best to secure them in the top bit of the fireplace, but three of the sides have a big lip they could rest on, and the 4th side has a small one. Or, well, I guess they'd... need to be attached to something that rests on the lip? I'll have to look at what options exist and how many lights I actually need.

Waterproofing:

I will also want to waterproof the fireplace itself to some extent. I don't imagine it would handle it well if exposed to water, and there's surely going to be some splashing or leaks or something. Some kind of plastic liner I guess? I'm mostly concerned about the bottom, the walls will probably be ok (but it's probably worthwhile to try to protect them too-- actually given that it's likely to be at least a bit humid in there I do want to protect the walls too.)

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Actively soliciting thoughts for any point of this tbc, or for things I haven't yet considered. The big pink text is just to highlight the bit that feels both trickiest and highest-value.

[eanholt]

My family went camping in a new area this week because I had some rockhounding sites I wanted to check out. The highlight was a roadcut with just absurd quantities of pyrite weathering out of the hillside. I picked up probably half a cup of these little guys (mostly smaller) in 2 hours, where I spent a lot of my time exploring different sections to figure out where material was coming from rather than exploiting one area. My wife had even more of a haul.

44.56952, -122.38473, #15 in Rockhounding Oregon.

I also got to play with panning for gold and maybe got 2 little flecks out of 6 pans or so.

[eanholt]

Seriously, hang out in a forum related to working with stone and you'll get tired of people asking "so what do you use for your PPE" and the answers are always like:

1) "At least an n95 with a good seal. Silicosis will fuck you up, I know a guy. But, like, why fuck around? Use a p100 and keep things wet."

2) "Eh, nothing usually unless it's extra dusty. Hasn't fucked me up yet."

We've apparently invented an artificial stone that, when cut, functions as a kind of Super Asbestos.

So, you know, watch out for that.

[eanholt]

Instructions didn't load on a captcha today, and I feel like that's quite the step up in difficulty: select the squares that are the kind of squares that a captcha creator would want you to select out of a picture like this.

[eanholt]

I've cobbled together the rock polishing machine and got things rolling! There's a bit of wobble I don't love, but it's no worse than the middle-of-the-road machines at the rock club. It took a lot of tries and failures to figure out how to get everything to line up well (particularly with the motor's nigh-unreplaceable cord, which had been worn through and then electrical taped back together, and I've now trimmed to undamaged length).

Next up for this project is designing and building the catch trays and hoods. Either I learn how to build water-tight plastic trays, or learn to bend sheet metal. Both sound fun and challenging, but I think I have the materials for learning to do plastic currently, as long as it's possible to do a good enough job without vacuum forming.

So far this build is like $400 of parts, compared to a $2000-3000 machine normally.