#tools man

[testormblog]

Learning the Tools

Grade seven was a paradoxical year for me.  On Saturdays, I pretended to be quiet and pious in confirmation class aside from my furtive winks at the pretty girl.  Yet on Wednesdays, I was as noisy as I could be, banging the hell out of timber boards or tin sheets with a hammer and real religious fervour.

Pop was a tools man.  Given I had lurked in his shadow since I began to walk, I wanted to be one too.  My Uncle Alan, a bridge carpenter, was one but Dad wasn’t.  It befuddled me that my father couldn’t drive a nail or use a screw driver.  Maybe, Dad’s fingers lacked the dexterity required.  Perhaps, I inherited my dexterity from Mother.  She certainly had it to thread needles.  Consequently, my father owned very few tools.  Pop had probably given Dad the hammer and the hand saw hidden away in our shed although he came by when anything in our house needed repair.

I often ogled Pop’s tools.  Alan stored his tools at Pop’s place too.  I was careful not to let my light fingers anywhere near those.  I learnt that tools were to men what jewellery was to women only useful.  Whenever Pop worked with his tools, I watched intently.  As I grew, he taught me their uses and how to handle them safely then let me help him.  Sometimes, we worked together with the cross cut saw to fell trees.  Young though I was, the saw was safer and easier to use with one of us at each end.

In my final two years of primary school, the Education Department gave me the opportunity to attend rural school one day a week at a much larger district school.  This scheme strove to prepare boys, without academic prospects due to their circumstances, for a trade, and girls for home duties in readiness for marriage.  Despite the government department’s dictum, my school teacher strongly discouraged me and other students from participation.  Fortunately, the decision was ours and our parents to make.  Since the Railway would issue me a travel pass, my parents didn’t care what I chose to do.  So, of course, I was going!  I was born to be a tools man.  Ronnie was going too.  His father didn’t mix his words with the school teacher.  With the two class brains absent, the dunderheads remained and only wished to do diddy squat.  Our school teacher found the situation quite an inconvenience.  For the other four days a week, he attempted to mentally intimidate us whenever possible in front of our classmates.  We knew his game and acted, as best as we could, like saints.

So, Ronnie and I caught the train to Beenleigh and walked the kilometre to the school. We were now thirteen and quite familiar with catching trains.  Children from a few other country schools joined us.  Before long, on our train trips home, an orange peel fight would erupt amongst everybody.  Fortunately, we jumped off at the first stop and escaped these and the usual reprimand from the guard.

The first day was a big deal for us.  We met the twenty plus other boys in our class.  We felt a bit lost to start with amongst so many strangers.  We had to find our way around the school too.  This had lots of buildings, numerous teachers and hundreds of students compared with our one room one teacher school with forty children from the age of five to fourteen.  It was really three schools in one, a primary, a secondary and the rural school with its two big sheds.  When I saw inside these sheds, my eyes opened in wonderment.  I wanted to use every tool in them.  I eyed the electric powered tools enthusiastically.  Pop didn’t own any of these!  One shed was set up for woodwork and the other for tin smithing and technical drawing.

I thought our teacher was an odd man.  Ronnie conferred.  We found his mannerisms strange.  Today, a person would say he was effeminate.  Back then, we, country lads, were innocent of different sexual orientations.  Soon after, I’d unfortunately see him drunk outside of school hours.  Sadly, the harsh social judgement of the community cost him his job.  The man didn’t act inappropriately or unkindly towards us or any boys we knew.

When the new teacher walked in, every single boy’s mouth gaped open in utter silence.  A real hero stood before us!  A very masculine one!  This teacher was Wally Walmsley, an all round cricketer and the coach for the Queensland Cricket Team.  Back then, cricketers worked in day jobs too.  This hero was a batsman capable of batting in any position and was a master of the leg break and googly bowling techniques.  Nobody played up in class!  Of course, we boys played cricket with him at lunch breaks.

In woodwork, I learnt joinery, in particular how to dove tail two pieces of wood together with intersecting cut teeth.  If one wanted to become a furniture or cabinet maker, they needed this skill.  I was just happy I could now repair things that broke at home.  The best thing I made was a sewing box with drawers, which I graciously gave to Mother.  I really enjoyed working with wood and was quite skilled at it given Pop’s earlier teaching.  I found tin smithing more difficult however.  Cutting tin sheets into patterned pieces and hammering these into the required shapes to make cake tins and billy cans was easy enough.  Alas, I struggled to solder the joins between the pieces of tin neatly.  Whilst this worried me at the time, I needn’t have been concerned.  I wasn’t destined to be a plumber.  Besides, soldering would soon become an obsolete skill when the fabrication of metal tanks and the connection of metal pipework ceased.

Alas, the moment I picked up my pencil and slid my set square and T square around a large sheet of paper in my technical drawing class, my imagination came alive and my ability shone.  I was already good at drawing.  I realised a plan was just the specifications for a pattern to construct something.  I knew about patterns and measurements.  I had watched Mother draft and cut out hundreds of patterns for the dresses she sewed her clients.  I also had a natural eye for perspective and could draw it in my diagrams.  Perhaps, my roaming up and down dale over the countryside had developed my spatial awareness.  Then, with my aptitude for mathematics, everything in technical drawing made sense.

I no longer knocked pieces of wood together in a haphazard way to build something.  I calculated the size and measurements for my projects and drew scaled plans with different drawings for their various elevations and perspectives.  I cut the timber or tin according to these plans and the scales required and built my projects.  I used my brain to design and my hands to construct.

I grew from wanting to be a tools man, who followed instructions, to be a design man, who determined the instructions.  I’d subsequently learn that draftsmen were the best paid of the trades too.

I had discovered my gift; a gift that would open the door to my future!

[one-time-i-dreamt]

I was a superhero whose normal job was an office worker for my nemesis, a billionaire. I would have my suit on under my clothes, and when the city called for Manhattan Man, I would run to this (consistently empty) meeting room and change.

One day, I happened to look up mid-change and there was this giant fucking. security camera pointed directly at me. HOW LONG WAS IT THERE FOR?!

[abd-illustrates]

🧡 Lance 🧡

I’ve been bitten by the “I need to draw my OCs or I’ll explode” bug once again 😔🙏 It’s been too long since I’ve drawn Lance - but I have a much clearer idea of who he is and what he’s about nowadays, so I tried to put plenty of attitude into this one! ⚔️🐉

[DO NOT EDIT OR REPOST TO OTHER SITES / ACCOUNTS] ♻️reblogs are lovely tho!♻️

[lotus-pear]

free will is drawing ur two favorite characters together and making them gay

[strawberri-draws]

im sure this has been done before but. snow leopard mobei-jun that has white hair in winter <3

[arthur-lesters-liver]

They're right, there are only 2 genders:

Jonathan Sims with an axe and Colin Becher with an hammer.

[storekn1fe]

csmtober day 9: jigsaw puzzle

[chipper-smol]

one thing that irks me about tech bros is that they fundamentally misunderstand how artists seek out tools to help their process

the thing about creating innovations and tools is figuring out how to streamline an annoying part of the process so you can get to the fun part of the process.

If I don't have to worry about drawing every strand of hair on a cat, that makes it easier for me to draw a cat: and so people in the community have made so so so many hair texture brushes with all these different and shapes to help me create that cat

in motion graphics animation, it'd be a massive time sink to manipulate a model Frame By Frame without keyframe interpolation. Keyframe interpolation is where you tell the computer to move an object from point A to C and the computer fills in what point B is. Its a feature and a tool that reduces the workload of a project and allows you to focus on what you really want to do instead!

which is why anytime I read and hear about a tech bro going off about the wOndERs oF Ai I wonder if they actually have any knowledge of the field they're trying to solve problems for, or if they're just moonlighting as Explorers of the New World granting Savages new technologies that they're too dumb to understand

[ffcrazy15]

There's this way of doing female-ness in Christianity that I call "pastel flower journal Christianity." I've got nothing against pastel flower journals per se, but for some reason people believe it's the end all and be all of female spirituality, and I think it's a real disservice towards young Christian women.

One of these days I'd like to start a prayer-and-reading group or something for young women, but there would be no floral themes or over-focus on how "God thinks you're beautiful even if the world doesn't" (a true statement, but it's wayyyyy too often the focus in women's spiritual reading). Instead we would be reading:

Seneca's Letters from a Stoic

Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning

Sheed's A Map of Life

Portions of Pieper's book on leisure

Kreeft's Three Philosophies of Life

Guardini's The Lord (or something similar)

Therese's Story of a Soul

and some select portions of the Nicomachean Ethics.

(Also they're all getting the porn talk. I don't know why we give the porn talk to young men but not young women. There's this idea that women don't use porn and they only need the talk about "guarding their heart." Bullshit. There's porn on the YA shelves of Barnes and Nobles and before that there were bodice rippers. Young women need the porn talk too.)

Every young woman needs to be getting a basic grounding in virtue ethics, logic, natural law, scholastic philosophy and Biblical hermeneutics if they're going to get by in today's spiritual landscape. Enough faffery and emotionalism in young women's spiritual education! Give them real food to chew on, not pasty sentimentalism!

[darkmuffinstudios]

i love how you draw the sans Aus so much

genuinely i want to draw them like you (not exactly the same but i hope you get what i mean)

(sorry if this was submitted twice, my computer was acting weird)

I recorded my process of how I sorta draw them ofshdjchsxuvhfneld

[accirax]

a collection of DCAS memes so far

[buttdumplin]

going to look at houses with one of the boys because yall need a bigger one with more rooms now that ale and rudy have officially joined the polycule and the agent is really working the kids angle for "you and your... husband?" and ofc it's johnny who goes with you and he's feeding into it by only referring to them as "the boys" that by the time you've settled on a house and you get the agent to do one last viewing so they can all come see, her head fucking explodes first when she sees "the boys" and again after they all take their turns giving you and johnny your initial smooches, and the smile on johnny's face tells you this couldn't have played out as perfectly even in his dreams

[pockethep]

Asa and guilt have been VERY prevalent in Part 2 thus far and when I heard Asa and Yoru talking about guilt earlier, I assumed Yoru would use Asa's survivors guilt and guilt over CSM 167 as a way to make some very powerful weapons.

I also thought the strength of a weapon being proportional to the guilt felt about making said weapon was a limitation/adjustment from Asa hosting Yoru, rather than hybridizing like Denji.

But THIS is why the gun and tank weapons are more powerful. Chainsaw man has always been about family and how people use familial bonds for self fulfillment. Yoru killed her own children for the chance to strike Pochita down. Yoru deciding that that slim chance she could win or even turn the battle in her favor is worth the very lives of her children, children who she sees and uses as an extension of herself.

The guilt of such an action is unparalleled.

Even the act of tying motherhood to war, sacrificing your body and life to raise someone and therefore owning said child is GENIUS.

Fujimoto cooked.

[jayjay-thejet-plane]

Got inspired by a scene halfway through this fic by hangmanbradshaw so heres a hangster wip for yall!

[pizzat-i]

A Touch Of Destiny redraw! 

the first drawing was made around early August 2023 so happy 10 months to it yipee 

now the reason why this redraw was done in the first place was because I didn’t like how underwhelming the atmosphere turned out last time, so I hope that it’s been properly dramatised now lmao

and a side by side comparison, for funsies

[daily-sifloop]

The quote "thinking about you" appeared in my head so i leave it to you <3

Day 93: All the things about you