It definitely sucks, but there are an increasing number of people like Ian of Forgotten Weapons getting people interested for the same reasons I am, really only getting into the politics from the historical or design perspectives, and always in a very objective manner. I’m also now in a far more liberal area and the local ranges are very inclusive, so that helps immensely.
Try being someone on the liberal side of the political spectrum who is primarily into the history and engineering of firearms, rather than the power fantasy of “gubmint and libruls better fear muh guns”.
It’s an absolute hellscape and it’s extremely disheartening to start talking with someone and sharing in a common interest, then seeing “FJB” and 1488 bumper stickers. I refuse to let bigots ruin my hobby though, and make an effort to make the hobby as inclusive as possible.
Oh, for sure. Likely, it’s not even going to be a “better” car, it’s going to be a much slower car, but with a better driver. That would be even more galling, to have his flashy sports car passed by some dude in a Miata.
This was explained to me as being a car person vs a “car person” by a friend who mentioned what giant douchebags car people are, in a group chat with her best friends who are extreme car nerds.
I know it’s getting into a sort of strawman/“No True Scotsman” realm, but I’ve definitely noticed it at a lot of car meets unfortunately. There are a lot of people who are very much attracted purely to the idea that “fast loud vroom car will make me attractive as a person”, and those tend to be the assholes who buy a $100k sports car that they won’t even take to a local autocross, and will use it solely to terrorize people in surrounding neighborhoods.
On the other hand, there are people who get excited seeing basically any interesting car. It doesn’t matter if it’s slow and cheap and isn’t flashy, it’s just a unique car and that should always be exciting to see.
My stepfather very much falls into the 1st category, and going to Woodward (absolutely massive car show/cruise in Detroit) was absolutely painful. He would shit on basically every car that went by, and on the rare occasion a flashy supercar drove by, would be like “I bet my car is just as fast”. He’s had multiple very nice sports cars, and I’ve invited him numerous times to autocross/track events, but he refuses it every time questioning why he’d want to. He’d much rather be an idiot doing 3x the speed limit on backroads than just take it to any one of the many nearby track events. Absolute numpty
To be fair, I jailbroke my iPhone 3GS when I was 13 because I saw someone do it on YouTube.
Yeah, I think that a lot of people misinterpret this since “turn hobby into job” seems to be the only way people think about it.
I like cars and work in the automotive industry, and very much enjoy what I do. I also enjoy working on cars and other mechanical things as hobbies, but would absolutely loathe being a professional mechanic or technician. There’s enough separation between what I do for fun and what I do for work that it won’t sour my hobbies, but also enough overlap that my passion for my hobbies makes work far more enjoyable.
All of the Covenant designs are meant to be very organic looking. In the novels, the ships and such are described as “looking like undersea predators”
FYI, Deoxit works a lot better than WD-40 and is designed to not eat plastics like some of the petroleum distillates in WD-40 can.
Anker is basically the only phone accessory brand I use. Now that iPhone moved to USB-C, Costco finally carries USB-C cables and they sell a really nice set of Anker cables, and Costco vouching for them tells me all I need to know.
I take the “Two is one, and one is none” mindset on it. I don’t think most people need to have 2 on every floor like I do, but I still would be very concerned about having any sort of shop and it not having its own dedicated extinguisher. I’ve got the little 2.5lb guys in the house, but I want a 10lb’er anywhere with fuel sources. They’re so cheap and take up so little space, I really don’t get why you wouldn’t want more than one.
I’ve never really had anything more than some brake cleaner residue catch fire or a flare up in the kitchen, but it’s just such a cheap form of insurance that I’d rather have “too many” than too few.
I’ve never had to directly deal with a fire, but after an incident where a roommate took the only extinguisher in the house when he moved out and an electrical short from an old crappy dimmer switch, I’m big on having a couple on-hand.
I also have way too many hobbies involving stuff that can easily catch fire and they’re so cheap that I have multiple on each floor. 2 on the upper floor where my sim-rig, 3D printers, reloading supplies, and electronics soldering bench are. One in the kitchen and one in the master bedroom. 2 in the garage (excluding the one that’s mounted in my old MG), and finally one in the basement since there’s basically nothing down there.
I’m glad that you’re the only person who buys the entire global supply of phones then.
It’s not like some people might be harder on phone batteries and need to replace them sooner, or enjoys just setting their phone down to charge it, or has expensive non-BT headphones they want to use because BT compresses the audio and BT mics are absolutely horrible compared to even dollar store earbuds.
But, as we established, those people don’t exist because you are literally the only person on this planet that uses a smartphone, so the entire global market can cater to your use cases and no one else’s, and it’s great they have gotten rid of all those features just for you.
Kombi, like the VW bus
Generally, I’m all for things that limit emissions and improve safety. I always thought they were a PITA, but couldn’t really be that much worse than the ones I see people use at the track usually.
I finally picked one up because it was all they had at the store, and holy shit those “safety tanks” are a nightmare by comparison. They spill so much fuel and after only a couple of years the seals on mine have gone bad and leak even more. I still would like to add a flame arrestor into the necks, but it amazes me at how awful they are.
I wholly understand why they exist and what all the safety features are for (preventing fuel from spilling if they’re tipped/dropped, releasing fuel vapors, etc) but they seem utterly useless when I inevitably spill at least half a cup of fuel per 5 gal, just due to how poorly they’re made.
Which is one of the things that people seem to forget about with Microsoft when they think that them pushing Linux is some nefarious plot to kill Linux and get everyone on Windows. At this point, it’s like 12% of their total revenue. Not insignificant, but they’re likely going to see far more growth pushing products related to Azure, which most instances are going to be running some sort of Linux VMs.
Microsoft saw the writing on the wall a while ago, and knows that the desktop and even embedded environment is a small slice of the computing pie. They would obviously still prefer to own 100% of that, but they also saw that there’s a finite number of users and devices that’ll use Windows, while there’s effectively an infinite number of things that people can put on their cloud services. Even if it has to be a “competing” OS, they’re making a shitton of money regardless.
I’d love to see a picture! You definitely buy a British car for the looks rather than the speed haha. My Midget has some sort of aftermarket exhaust it came with, and it sounds amazing working it up through the gears, even if you’re only doing 50 by the time you’ve hit redline in 3rd.
Oh man, British cars are the best/worst for this I feel. I picked up a 72 Midget a couple of years ago, and while it was a shitton of work, it really wasn’t horribly expensive for me to to a full down to bare metal restoration on it.
Yeah, this isn’t as bad as “fabrege eggs” or “Picassos” or something. He could totally be buying nothing but LeMans heritage race cars, but you can get some really nice cars for way less than you’d think. If it’s your only hobby and you do lots of trading and looking for barn finds, you can have a decent collection for not a whole lot of money.
World War Z is phenomenal as an audio book. Absolute all-star cast of readers with a great story, 1000x more entertaining than the movie.