She also really should have finished paying off that CC debt and delayed the down payment; that’s just a killer and is almost certainly at 3 or 4 times the interest rate of her mortgage, which incidentally could have been a bit lower if her debt-to-income ratio were better. Shit sucks, but somebody who’s doing okay and fucks it up gets less sympathy from me than people who would do anything to be living paycheck to paycheck with a steady income and home ownership.
Also gotta love how many of these people remember Trump fondly because he was president WHILE THE GOVERNMENT WAS CUTTING THEM CHECKS! That’s absolutely not gonna be his plan in round two.
There’s a very specific type of crazy person, more common in the US and Canada than elsewhere, who call themselves sovereign citizens. OP is fond of featuring them in particular on this community, because they really are bafflingly, amusingly crazy.
The short version of it is that they believe that no one can be subject to the laws of a political unit without their explicit consent, and that the legal system is built around tricking you into conflating your legal status with your actual, fully sovereign personal identity (EDIT… sort of… @Tar_Alcaran comments below have better info). They believe that if they just say the exact right things in court at the right time, then they cannot be held responsible for any laws, that all of their interactions with the government are really their attempts to escape some illegitimate combination of admiralty law and the “Uniform Commercial Code” which isn’t even law anywhere, it’s just a model prepared by law professors and adapted by states (though never 100%). Some of the SovCits even believe that the federal government is bound by law to hold the taxes paid by them and their ancestors in trust and that if you do the paperwork EXACTLY right, the government has to turn it over to you.
This leads them to do dumb shit like drive without a license, registration, or insurance, and to insist on turns of phrase that are distinctions without differences, such as “I wasn’t driving, I was traveling.” Some of them insist that if a US flag has an embroidered fringe that this is evidence of the conspiracy. They waste time in the courts, and then they take any attempts by the authorities to humor them, to decide not to deal with their shit that particular day, or to preserve their rights to be evidence that the SovCit theory is on the right track and they’ll get it right at the next appearance!
Really, it’s stupid people who don’t understand the world, and who feel like they don’t have everything that they deserve, trying to impose some order and control on a system that is confusing, even if it requires magical thinking to do so. It would be sad if they weren’t acting in ways that are completely anti-social and even dangerous. From there, they usually descend into the rabbit hole of generic New World Order, “the bankers run everything” conspiracy bullshit that actually underpins the “movement”.
This is almost certainly a late 1940s model, though maybe early 50s. The lever fills were phased out for all but black after the war. Re-sacced this one many years ago, IIRC with the polysac out of a Sheaffer converter, but I’m not inclined to crack it open to verify. Conical 14K triumph nib in a western F/M. Smooth with a...
Well, they were being phased out of the higher end stuff in the late 40s, and the Craftsman and Admiral still came in lever-fill in any color, but the Statesman and Valiant only had it in black. I think they were doing a lot of “cap engineering” in those days where you were largely paying for more gold bling on the cap, going from skinny little ring all the way up through the whole cap being chased and gold-filled. The 1949 catalogue is HERE. Sometimes the Statesman came in conical nib, sometimes in traditional. The main thing is that it was whichever one they were charging ten bucks for that year, LOL.
Here’s a pretty similar one that Peyton Street Pens sold sometime in the last few years.
I’m actually pretty optimistic about most modern pens, both because materials science has obviously improved, and they are as you say sort of niche luxury goods where people will pay extra for quality. I think the average FP user is no longer going through life with their main pen in their pocket using it all day, every day. Most of us baby our pens quite a bit, and probably write a lot fewer words per pen.
The other comment is a bit over the top, but SNW was basically custom crafted to appeal to people who didn’t care for those two. It’s brighter (like, literally), more optimistic, more episodic, more grounded in the lore, gives more of the cast room to breathe, and occasionally it’s even intentionally silly. I guess if somebody is done then they’re done, but complaints from people like them were clearly taken into account when writing and producing the show.
One of the stepper motors’ switch things (the metal part that hits the bar to tell the motor it’s at one end of the track) came out and it’s either bent too much or snapped off (it’s so small I can’t really tell) and it doesn’t go back in place, which means I can’t use the printer because the motor with the head on...
I have an Aquila, though I haven’t lost a limit switch yet. The limit switch assemblies (microswitch, PCB, and connector) should be Ender 3 compatible and are therefore like $10 for 5. I wouldn’t really try to get more granular than that on the repair.
Yeah, but damn near everything is some sort of adaptation now. You’ve almost got to ignore that it’s an existing brand at all. There’s “animated Red Dwarf” potential there, and if it sucks, as it very well could, no one will care that the Among Us lore was “betrayed.”
Hi everyone, I found out yesterday that I’ll be going to Dallas for my psychiatry residency! Super excited to get started, I’m coming from the northeast. Would appreciate any advice about Dallas including neighborhoods, things to do, food, what’s dart and is it reliable?...
M Streets, Oak Lawn, Uptown, Bishop Arts all are walkable-ish, in the sense that you can arrange it to have one grocery store, one pharmacy, a couple of coffee shops, and a few boutiques, restaurants and bars in walking distance. Get close to a Dart Rail station, and you can add a handful of other small entertainment districts surrounding developed stations, but all of this will simply reduce your need for car-based transportation, not eliminate it. Then factor in that while walking a few blocks in Texas heat is nothing like impossible, doing so while remaining hygienic starts to be. If you plan well, and if you’re going to be busy at work all the time anyway, you might pull it off with walking, transit, biking, and Uber, but I would suggest that you get living arrangements that could accommodate a car even if you try to go without at first.
Google Maps with Street View is your friend when looking at this stuff. See if the sidewalk goes all the way from the house/apartment to the cool pub you saw. Check your commute and set the departure time to when you’ll actually be commuting. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume schools are not an issue, which will help a lot with finding something kinda cool while still being halfway affordable.
Also, get your spice tolerance up. If you can’t handle some jalapenos on your nachos or basic white-people-compatible Indian food, no one will respect you, LOL. 🤣
Finally, remember that as fucked as Texas politics can be, it’s only about 5:4 crazies to sane, and in your professional community in the middle of Dallas it will be better, but be ready for the 5.
I assumed most apartment buildings offered parking for tenants. Is that not something I should assume as a default?
Most should have something, but some complexes will handle it better than others. You may not get reserved parking or covered parking without paying extra. I’d say just ask if the listing is not clear. If you start looking at renting a house or a room/garage apartment, things could get weird in those slightly denser neighborhoods.
A Colorado man who was placed on life support after he was bitten by his pet Gila monster died of complications from the desert lizard’s venom, an autopsy report obtained by The Associated Press on Friday confirmed....
I think there are only a couple of species of venomous lizards in the world, and the Gila Monster, native to Mexico and the US southwest, is well known as a staple of childhood “amazing creature” factoids. He knew exactly what he was doing by living with them. I don’t think they’re as aggressive or as virulent as some venomous snakes, but sad as it is, this falls squarely into “irresponsible verging on Darwin Award” territory.
I have an Ender 3 S1 that I use every couple of months at this point because it’s just such a pain to use. I have to adjust the bed tramming and z offset and run auto bed leveling for every single print and often times that’s still not good enough....
I have an Ender 3 clone, a Voxelab Aquila, that I got as an open box. I think its bed is a little warped, or it’s possible there were some parts that were not perfectly square that I still left alone when I finished putting it together. I don’t have auto-bed leveling or anything.
I will not say it’s trouble free, but it’s no nightmare. I have to tram every 5-10 prints assuming I don’t try to get the print off the glass plate without gently removing it from the bed first. I also wipe with a little alcohol before every print, and occasionally use a little gluestick if it’s being a butt, but overall it’s all very livable. Tramming can be tedious as it’s never quite perfect, but I generally get good first-layer adhesion (especially if I use a brim), with a touch of elephant foot. For a hundred twenty bucks two years ago, it’s been a good purchase, though these days I think you do better even without hunting for a MicroCenter Ender.
Alright, kiddos. Play time is over. And by “over,” I specifically mean the opposite of that, and it’s time to play with pens and photography equipment....
I don’t have an A2, but it reminds me of the previous version of the Namiki VP, the “faceted” one. I had a hunter green one that was nice, and a touch slimmer than my current Pilot Capless special alloy (it’s steel btw… the special alloy is steel), but the Namiki leaked like a submarine with a screen door. Clicky retractables are just nice when you might find you’re switching between typing and writing a lot.
Yes, but the idea is that UBI money still spends, and there’s still overall much more money than that in the economy, so there should be a floor for the housing and food that a UBI will buy you, even if housing and food use up most or all of it.
Kind of like how increasing a rocket’s size increases its fuel need increases its size some more, anyone implementing UBI needs to make logical guesses about the amount of inflation and knock-on effects and try to accommodate them, but the idea is to make sure no one is flat broke and starving even if it doesn’t really lift people out of poverty directly. SOMEBODY will fill the market niche for people seeking housing and food on UBI, and it will be up to the government to ensure they meet minimum health standards and to incentivize/mandate enough of it. Also, any UBI system probably also needs to have a very graceful downward curve (if you have one at all) as other income increases, so that people will be willing to work to supplement it rather than fearing that they have to choose between UBI and backbreaking labor in exchange for “UBI plus a dollar.”
UBI is not a magic bullet, but it is a sort of quick and dirty social safety net that inserts the government’s money into the system without the political and administrative overhead of running housing etc. programs itself. Theoretically that might mean things happen more efficiently, and if it’s more than the literal bare minimum to live then it also affords a certain amount of agency to the people on it to use their remaining resources how they see fit, but it could go really wrong too. You still need regulation and the power to adjust amounts to ensure that the UBI people receive is adequate for the intended purpose, and a bad UBI program could be run in a way where a government uses it as an excuse to simply abdicate any further responsibility for its people’s well being.
To a certain extent we do, and frankly if UBI ever comes to the US it will probably be in the form of a Tax Credit. While most of us on Lemmy would probably agree the end result is grossly inadequate, the weird soup of taxes, credits, and deductions is the result of generations of politicians working the most accessible levers to manipulate economic policy, occasionally even with decent intentions.
Probably not in stores, but you can get PC monitors up to about 43", and there are also “commercial signage” or “business” displays which are about $150-200 more than a similarly spec’ed smart TV from the same company (lots of Samsungs on Amazon), and may not come with a stand or possibly speakers. Some smart TVs also let you switch inputs without connecting to WiFi. I think most mainstream media projectors are not smart yet, though it’s creeping into that space as well. If everything else is already tracking you, I do tend to wonder how much worse the TV is, but there are ways to pay for a little less privacy invasion from your “TV.”
Look at it! Behold the butyl overmold on the comically oversized cap! See the screen printed lines like a 90s basketball sneaker! Feel the forced ergonomics of the weird section! Examine the submarine portholes of an ink view window!...
So, at first blush that seems odd. Fountain pens can be finicky, no two ways about that, but even with sort of infrequent use they shouldn’t be that bad. Still, maybe we can figure something out.
How long are you going in between uses?
What make and model are the fancy ones?
Do the fancy ones work better than the cheap ones?
What ink are you using?
When you clean them, are you using anything to actively cycle water through them?
That could result in some hard starting, but it shouldn’t be the end of the world.
Lots of good stuff in that price range, but some not so great either. Wordsworth and Black is a bit overpriced for what they are, but shouldn’t be actively bad, and usually with stuff like that the biggest issue is durability of the finishes and QC over a manufacturing run. If an individual pen writes well, then it’s a good pen.
Okay, not surprising, really, but was worth asking.
Now HERE is where we might be onto something. Did you use their inks officially labeled as “drawing inks”? If so, have you used them in every pen that’s having issues? Shellac based drawing inks are NOT for fountain pens, and I’m a little surprised they still work at all if they have month-old dried drawing ink in the feeds (that’s the grooved plastic bit that goes under the nib and up through the section or “grip”). I don’t actually see where Winsor Newton sells fountain pen safe ink, so this is at least a clue. For the cartridges, I’m guessing they’re fine though you could always try a better known brand that is known to be well behaved. Generally, if the company is old AF, sells pens in addition to ink, and the colors are boring, then it’s safe: Waterman, Pilot, Pelikan, Lamy, etc. It’s rare to find anything but fountain pen ink in fountain pen compatible carts, but make sure they do say it’s FP ink.
That generally SHOULD work plenty well enough to keep pens in good working order, even without being hot, though if something is really gunked up, a little windex can help, and for modern pens a lot of people like a cheap ultrasonic cleaner. If there’s shellac in there, it’s gonna be a more specialized process to save your two nice ones, and a slightly sad garbage day for the cheapos. Shellac softens in very hot water, so maybe that’s how you’ve managed to get any cleaning done.
Tip down can be good to get your initial flow going, but over a long storage period it can occasionally cause a few problems, as there’s more ink closer to the air in the cap (and many caps are intentionally not airtight anyway). Tip up would have some of it very slowly draining back into the cartridge or converter (that’s the name for the reusable cartridges), so it might not write immediately after being stored for a month, but it’d be less likely to completely clog. It’s splitting hairs a bit on most modern pens though, and I think the real reason it used to be discouraged more aggressively is because leaky vintage pens could leave several drops in the cap, especially if you had a low-pressure front come through.
TL;DR: The low hanging fruit to be investigated first is that drawing ink.
Oh yeah, that’ll do it. India Ink can be death to fountain pens if left even overnight. Honestly, your pens might never work quite right again, but at a minimum soak and then flush them again with the hottest water you can physically touch to try to soften up the shellac and get it out. Some people completely disassemble and try flossing the combs of the feed, and some just give up.
For a nice deep black FP ink, Aurora is good, as are Pilot, Lamy, and Sailor. I’m enjoying J. Herbin Perle Noire myself right now. Pelikan and Waterman are little less dark, but should also work well in pretty much any pen.
Finally, if you want new pen recommendations, we’re all here.
If nothing else works, you can try, but you start to run into what the harsher chemicals will do to the plastic of the feed. Without some materials science research (always plausible on Lemmy), this would be best done in an incremental escalation process, LOL. If there’s sentimental value, you could always replace the section/nib unit and keep the barrel and cap, though that does effectively double the price of your pen. Or shoot, maybe write the company; I think Wordsworth & Black are sort of boutique rebranding operation, and they might be happy to keep a customer satisfied with a fairly small cost of goods on the spare parts.
Good luck! I dodged the bullet on India ink, but I have a dead Parker Vacumatic in my parts drawer that will speak to the fact we all make mistakes.
Yeah, they’re oddly complex little devices for what is effectively a straw with a thumb covering one end. Glad you’re at least going to get the gift writing again.
I do wish I could find my old Atari XEGS. The 7800 still works, though the RF Converter is junk. I could mod it, but I’m happy enough with an emulator not to head down that particular rabbit hole.
Well that was more research than I was expecting, but thank you. I wonder if either is standardized anywhere. The whole design of plugging the back seems like it’s expensive in materials and time, but maybe cheaper in tooling. Have to assume most manufacturers using it are skimping on the ink itself, too.
40-year-old homeowner says economy doesn’t add up: ‘I’m making the most money I’ve ever made, and I’m still living paycheck to paycheck’ (fortune.com)
“There’s this wild disconnect between what people are experiencing and what economists are experiencing,” says Nikki Cimino, a recruiter in Denver.
Church Claims Activism a Tactic of Satan and Gaslights Members (wasmormon.org)
A two part tale of a sovcit in court. He's figuring it out. (lemmy.world)
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/967424b6-8d33-41b0-a3db-7b9a117a645b.png
Vintage: Sheaffer Lifetime “Statesman” lever fill (lemmy.world)
This is almost certainly a late 1940s model, though maybe early 50s. The lever fills were phased out for all but black after the war. Re-sacced this one many years ago, IIRC with the polysac out of a Sheaffer converter, but I’m not inclined to crack it open to verify. Conical 14K triumph nib in a western F/M. Smooth with a...
‘Picard’ Season 2 Was Rewritten After Paramount Deemed It “Too Star Trek,” Says EP (trekmovie.com)
What would be the best way to fix the little stopper switch for one of the motors on my Aquilla?
One of the stepper motors’ switch things (the metal part that hits the bar to tell the motor it’s at one end of the track) came out and it’s either bent too much or snapped off (it’s so small I can’t really tell) and it doesn’t go back in place, which means I can’t use the printer because the motor with the head on...
‘Among Us’ Animated Series Casts Randall Park, Yvette Nicole Brown, Elijah Wood, Ashley Johnson (variety.com)
Moving to Dallas for my first real job!
Hi everyone, I found out yesterday that I’ll be going to Dallas for my psychiatry residency! Super excited to get started, I’m coming from the northeast. Would appreciate any advice about Dallas including neighborhoods, things to do, food, what’s dart and is it reliable?...
On the Implausibility of the Death Star’s Trash Compactor (www.mcsweeneys.net)
Colorado man died from pet Gila monster's venomous bite, autopsy shows (apnews.com)
A Colorado man who was placed on life support after he was bitten by his pet Gila monster died of complications from the desert lizard’s venom, an autopsy report obtained by The Associated Press on Friday confirmed....
Why does my printer suck so much?
I have an Ender 3 S1 that I use every couple of months at this point because it’s just such a pain to use. I have to adjust the bed tramming and z offset and run auto bed leveling for every single print and often times that’s still not good enough....
Po'tD 2024-03-16: Platinum Curidas (lemmy.world)
Alright, kiddos. Play time is over. And by “over,” I specifically mean the opposite of that, and it’s time to play with pens and photography equipment....
deleted_by_author
How dare you! (lemmy.world)
Ugly Pens: Rotring Core (lemmy.world)
Look at it! Behold the butyl overmold on the comically oversized cap! See the screen printed lines like a 90s basketball sneaker! Feel the forced ergonomics of the weird section! Examine the submarine portholes of an ink view window!...
Po'tD 2024-03-14: The Five Below Pen of Unknown Provenance (lemmy.world)
Spring is here, the air is clear, and the boid is on the wing. So here’s a pen that’s cheap and absoid, a pastel plastic thing....