Sometimes I think about that time I took my jacket to a seamstress to ask if she could replace the zipper, and she said in a somewhat cold tone that it would cost the same as getting a new one.

I said "Deal. When do you think you can have it done?"

And she just kind of lit up. When I came back to pick up the jacket she had also mended all the little tears.

I moved away shortly afterwards and have not returned since but I feel like a little tiny bit of magic may have happened at that moment.

I get my metal from scrap I find laying around, which in practical terms and given how things work in the globalized supply chain, is basically making something from nothing, so whatever waste I incur I'm still at >100% resource efficiency.

But there's a world out there where the skills to process materials are widespread and I'm not the only one scavenging what's left behind by the machine. And I want to inch humanity closer to that world because I believe it's better.

2/

TIL about Aristotle furnaces, which can melt little bits of iron scrap into larger steel masses that can be forged.

Considering the state of my ongoing projects and the state of winter's approach this would be a next season thing but man I gotta try this.

I believe in a circular economy that ties a closed loop into natural processes. Mill logs into lumber, process the waste food into fuel. Use fuel to process iron. Be so efficient that timber collection is sustainable.

1/

Still disappointed that there's a Kate Upton and a Kate Middleton but no Kate Downton

If, like me, you love pepper enough that a pepper grinder cannot grind pepper fast enough to empepper your meals to satisfaction within reasonable delays, consider a mortar and pestle, it's way faster.

html is pronounced "hot tamale"

If you think voting is not worth your time then take some time to wonder why fascist dictators try so hard to make it impossible

I was radicalized as a kid when I was playing a stupid online game called adventure quest and I went on a quest for this legendary sword called the blade of awe and the game let me go through the entire ordeal, fighting tough-ass monsters that I had to use my rare potions to defeat, and right at the point where I finally got the fucking sword the game told me I had to become a member for the low low price of 20 bucks a month in order to use it

One time I went at a furniture store and this salesman came by to sell me stuff and I was really just looking around for inspiration for stuff I'd build but it turned out the guy was also just a dude wrestling with demons I myself am familiar with and and we ended up just talking about real shit for like a half hour

Anyways that was pretty wholesome, it just popped into my mind again. Hope that guy's doing good these days.

Have you been hit and/or struck by a smooth criminal?

You may be entitled to compensation.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@luckytran/116863488282016628

Okay this is fucking wild.

If white people rich enough to own a fucking racing sailboat can't fly a flag with words on it without some government boat with a fucking machine gun coming over to escort them back to land, nobody in your damn country has any freedom of speech.

Nobody.

The most insidious lie of consumerism is defining us as "consumers".

We've got opposable thumbs and pattern-seeking brains so big they make up a third of our energy consumption at rest.

We're not drones who live to eat up whatever slop the machine serves us. We are creators.

There is no gain in letting that be taken from us and fragmented into impersonal institutions that serve the elite.

Efficiency be damned; better make one and keep it, than two and watch Bezos take half.

should be legal to slash the tires of douchebags who roll coal

CEOs plugging AI everywhere thinking they're getting 80% of results for 20% of effort, completely oblivious to the fact that what's really happening is they're cashing out on their brands' reputations. They have no idea of the value of social capital because they never had to work to build it.

Pretty much on the nose for rich kids who think they earned the privilege they were born in.

"I don't want to be THAT guy but..."

-- THAT guy

How to identify your enemy:

Step 1: it's the billionaires

Seriously though, become ungovernable

The man who begs for money and sleeps by the street is your brother. Do not look away from him.

Do not deny him his humanity when he is most alone.

3. There are many ways to enforce this scarcity, modern dollar bills are printed in controlled amounts and made to be difficult to counterfeit. This is what's called a "fiat" currency.

4. All the current currencies in the world are fiat currencies. We trust in our dollars/euros/yens/dalasis because we trust our governments to remain responsible in how they print them.

(1/N) This isn't advocacy for crypto, it's advocacy for understanding things. Okay so:

1. A "currency" is a system of tokens that have in themselves no intrinsic value but are accepted as having value by communal agreement.

2. The backbone of this agreement is trust in the scarcity of these tokens. If someone handed you a slip of paper as payment and you had no proof that they didn't just print it five minutes ago, you wouldn't trust it.