Don’t get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because wood is fiddly as fuck.
OR
DO get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because it will burn that shit right out of you If you don’t die from an aneurysm first. It’ll teach you to build all sorts of wiggle room into everything in life, not just furniture.
People will think what you made was amazing, that it took so much skill.
Nope.
Only you know how you put everything together loosely, then tightened screws incrementally while adjusting clamps and smacking it with a rubber mallet until it looked right. There are pilot holes they can’t see that don’t go anywhere. You definitely missed gluing something important. You might have weighted a piece with epoxy and cat litter because you forgot to buy weights, it was 3 am, and you were unintentionally high as balls on stain fumes, but you really wanted to finish in time to surprise your partner for their birthday.
They don’t know, they’ll never know, and they don’t need to know.
Don’t forget the thousands of dollars in tools you’ll be compelled to buy and never being able to throw out even the small piece of wood because “you might need it someday”.
Tell me about it, and there’s always something better than what you have. How to be smart about buying tools deserves its own entire comment chain.
I didn’t know about these until recently, but I now recommend folks check out local tool libraries to get started and see what they want or need for low to no cost.
We have a one car garage full of maintenance and fabrication tools I’ve acquired over my life. They’ve paid for themselves multiple times over in even just the last decade, but the cost and space requirements are prohibitive for a lot of folks. It’s one of those “having money saves money” situations, but tool libraries can help a lot.
Eating all the food you cook will make you fat
Especially if you want to make “good” food. I’m not saying there isn’t good food that is healthy for you. But if you want to make things taste like they do in a high end restaurant, it’s probably going to require a shitload of butter/ghee and salt. And then probably cream. And also highly fatty meats.
It’s usually just butter. So much fucking butter.
And also highly fatty meats. It’s usually just butter. So much fucking butter.
Anthropology: The study of mankind’s quest for readily available fat.
That my knees were going to go to shit, and carrying a backpack through the mountains needs good knees. Fuck, I miss those trips.
The correct number of guitars to own is n+1, with n being the number of currently owned guitars.
Dice. Definitely dice.
Same for cameras, axes and chainsaws…
Lenses maybe, camera bodies, nah.
And bikes, and computers
And freeway lanes necessary to solve traffic
Warhammer 40K is what some may call…MEGA EXPENSIVE.
For coding, I wish I had known that I will need to basically relearn the entire thing every 2-4 years due to frameworks and language design changes.
I kinda wish I considered my social anxiety and picked a better solitairy instrument than drums. They’re super fun to play, but I was only ever in one band and I’m too anxious to play with strangers right now. I just jam by myself, but I suspect I’d have an easier time actually writing music if I had more experience with melody. I tried picking up guitar and violin later, but so far I haven’t had the energy to really devote the time needed to learn another instrument.
Have you thought about an “MPC” type instrument like a Native Instruments Maschine? I feel like that might be a nice evolution for you as it would allow you to transition a love for percussion into a songwriting tool that is a blast to jam out with and make patterns with.
I mean, I really like nice finger drumming pads, but you could also just use a more traditional midi drum kit to record loops the point is that you can have a blast with an MPC type tool all by yourself with headphones on and you can then choose to share that or not, it is perfect as a solo instrument.
Bonus points you could record loops of yourself playing your actual drums and slice up the audio samples in an MPC, that would be super cool.
I also think as a drummer having an MPC might be really nice to throw loops of certain sections of songs into that you wanted to practice so that you could easily switch between them and keeping looping that section to practice as long as needed.
I had not thought about an mpc type instrument, but I’m going to look into it right now because that sounds cool lol
If you have a computer you can get a used/older NI Maschine for fairly cheap just make sure you get a software key. The pads feel really nice on those, but it is all down to preference.
A lot of people like the Ableton Push series of controllers but for me the pure playing feel of the Maschine is hard to beat and the ability to build loops into songs without looking at your computer screen while still having access to all the benefits of being connected to a computer (easy file access of samples for example) is really nice.
Go to Guitar Center or something and try out one, they are a blast I promise! They are inherently percussive instruments and I think having experience as a drummer is a great platform to enter into learning MPC type instruments from.
So I picked up a maschine+ because the standalone was important to me, and I’m absolutely loving it so far. Thanks again for the suggestion, this thing’s awesome.
Damn that puts a big ass smile on my face, congrats for getting a new awesome instrument and composition tool!
Losing Joann’s has made it really difficult to find fabric locally. Michael’s needs to step their game up.
Yeah, there really hasn’t been a good alternative for fabric. Lots of people were quick to jump on the “lol join the 21st century and just buy it online” side of the argument, but buying fabric is an extremely tactile experience. You need to feel it to know that it will have the correct texture, weight, see it will hang, which direction(s) it will stretch, how much it will stretch, how easy is is to stretch, etc for what you’re trying to make, because all of those qualities will heavily impact the end product. Those things are difficult to quantify, and nearly impossible to judge purely from photos on an online listing. Two fabrics that look identical online can have vastly different weights, stretch, textures, etc…
Move to Chicago, we have good local stores for fabric.
