Absolutely the hardest part was the shrinking. Most of the damage, I had access to both sides of the panel. Which means you can use a hammer and a block thing called a dolly. But you have to hold the dolly on one side and hammer on the other. Which is awkward as hell. It’s slow work, or was for me; I suppose a pro can go faster. And you have to be careful because if you overdo it, you can end up hardening the metal and end up with cracks.

All the videos and tutorials say to practice on some scrap sheet metal, but I didn’t have any, so it was trial by fire.

This was back in the summer, but my left shoulder is still being pissy about the positions I was in to reach the dolly to the middle of the roof and still see what I was hitting with the hammer.

Tbh though, it was much simpler than I thought. There’s plenty of good tutorials out there,and the concepts aren’t complicated at all, it’s the skill that’s fiddly and detailed.

Body work on my car.

I’m poor as fuck and had tree branches fuck me up. Decided I’m not willing to deal with the bullshit of finding a new one, especially with all the bullshit privacy invasion on top of buying the damn thing.

So, I borrowed tools, looked shit up, and while the car isn’t fully dent free or anything, it was good enough to replace windows and you have to get close to see the warping that’s left.

Took my crippled ass damn near two weeks because I could only work maybe a half hour, 45 minutes at a go once or twice a day. And I wasn’t working fast.

While it was much simpler than I thought it would be, those auto body pros deserve their damn pay. Shit is hard physically. Just replacing the side mirror had my back cramping and spasming for hours after, even with meds. And that was the easiest job involved.

Dunno that I learned enough to exactly say it’s a true skill, since it really only applies to my car, and the kind of damage done, but the parts of the frame that were bent are back in line, and the dents that needed shrinking are damn near invisible, which I’m proud as fuck of.

The painting sucks though lol. Couldn’t get a good sprayer on loan, and the one I could get was a bitch about not giving an even coat. The blending is not great. Visible from even a dozen feet away. A few drips too. But I ain’t worried about that with a car that’s damn near twenty years old.

Dunno what the hell I would have done without good neighbors and friends loaning me the gear. No way could I have afforded rental for the air compressor after the supplies cost, parts, and glass. Came out to a few hundred all told, but the estimate was damn near 1.2k

It isn’t an either/or proposition. There’s multiple ways to both have a viewing and keep a body from getting deep into decomposition, and there’s really no issues with the face automatically becoming grotesque. It really isn’t an every time thing. It isn’t even a majority of the time, when the body is kept cool enough. Pinning isn’t the only option for keeping a mouth closed either.

People have done in home wakes way longer than the funerary industry has existed. There’s plenty of options available.

You know, I never post much of anything. But even if I did, I couldn’t post most of my actual shower thoughts without calls for banning, psychiatric intervention, or exorcism. Maybe all at once.

I get too relaxed in the shower, and my weird shit comes to the surface.

As an example, a few nights ago I had a doozy. I had had a conversation with a friend via text where they yet again tried to talk me into running for mayor. A joke w as made on his part about electing me as dictator for life.

By the time I got in the shower, my brain w as scrambling coming up with ways I could get out of such a situation. One of the first things I thought up was doing something so atrocious that I would get thrown into jail for life, because someone would have to decide I couldn’t be allowed to roam free if I went hard enough.

What proceeded was a shower filled with my brain going through horrible things leaders have done in the past and concluding that there’s never any guarantee a madman will be taken down while not being killed because there are so many people that will support the kind of batshit crazy that commits atrocities.

Mind you, it isn’t always that fucking batshit, but whatever is in my brain when I get under warm, running water is going to keep percolating until it goes off the rails. I’ve learned to never shower after watching “true” crime shows, political ads, or visiting anything that deals with botched surgeries. Why? Because my brain can’t be trusted to not turn it into a game of “what if?” It will inevitably go to the darkest, ugliest possible places.

The goddess of grief

Lavender candy

Well, tbh, we don’t bother with it at all now. There’s not enough kids doing it to merit the expense or effort involved (and it ain’t like either are high enough to matter, which shows how bad Halloween has gotten).

But, yeah, back when kids still did it, who cares about costumes? Halloween isn’t dressupday. There’s other traditions involved, including kids running around and having fun just for the sake of the fun itself.

Besides, who am I to determine whether or not someone needs a costume? They might not be able to afford one. They might have some weird religious thing about masks or whatever. They might have some medical issue that prevents a costume. They might have had a costume, but something happened to it. I don’t know why they’re not wearing one. But if they show up at my door, they’re celebrating Halloween. They’re taking part in not only a community activity, but a very human activity. That’s worth some candy by itself.

Shit, I’ve given candy to adults that rolled up and said trick or treat because it isn’t only about kids. I’ve handed extra candy to adults and kids that asked with the explanation there was someone that couldn’t make it. IDGAF if it’s true or not, it isn’t about me.

I fucking miss Halloween the way it used to be. You’d think in this bumfuck nowhere semi rural town, we’d still have people out and about. But no, we haven’t had a single visitor on Halloween since covid. Even before that, it was two or three the entire night and had been for years.

There was so much fun in putting on a Halloween playlist, or movies, or whatever and waiting to see or hear someone coming. Even if I didn’t dress up myself, it was fun to see everyone out and enjoying the night. Hell, back when I was still in physical therapy, on a bloody walker, I was in the living room ready to go. Hopped up on pain meds, but still.

I’m envious that you live somewhere it’s still a big thing, costumes or not.

Sounds like me after taco bell

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Nah, you have the right kind of friend, they don’t just help but the body, they kill the fucker for you and you never know there’s a body

Nah, you were just being a dick for no good reason.

Well, I’m not in a situation where I can go otc for headaches. I’m already using acetaminophen (paracetamol for the brits) non stop for chronic pain, and I have to save ibuprofen for stuff that never responds to other pain control methods because I’m an old fuck and I’m not supposed to take it at all, and it causes problems when I ignore that and take it anyway.

Luckily, my headaches almost always stem from stress and/or muscle tension in my neck, so it’s very rare they don’t respond to non chemical methods, and I happen to have prescription meds that are prn for those things if I want/need.

But, for headaches, I used to find caffeine more effective than analgesics, nsaid or otherwise. Even when I wasn’t drinking caffeine regularly (which means I know that it wasn’t just caffeine withdrawal causing the headache to begin with), a cup of coffee usually got rise of a headache faster and more thoroughly than NSAIDs.

But it was usually acetaminophen that would be my first pick when I went the OTC pill route. Less likely to irritate my already irritating bowel syndrome issues.

Tbh though, none of the OTC analgesics are great at getting rid of a headache. Some of the older studies and double blind tests I saw put them about the same as placebo for headaches, though that’s been years since I looked up anything about it.

I painted my cat once.

Turns out, holding down a cat and painting one handed is hard.

Bad joke aside, your sis captured the cuddly sweetness perfectly. That boneless languor that cats have when comfy and sleepy. Beautiful work :)

Not that I know of for sure

Magic systems.

Not the spells, but how and why magic works in the first place.

For non magic worlds, it’s creating unique “races”. For my home brew ttrpg system and world, I’ve come up with a few that I’m extra proud of that I’ve never seen anything like. There’s one that I built from the ground up for my favorite player (shhh, DMs do have favorites, but it’s a secret) based off of a picture in a magazine, which isn’t totally unique because of that, but it’s still one of my better interactive bits in that world.

Is this really Linux drama though? It seems more like political drama that ended up jizzing on Linux.

I mean, yeah, there’s been drama after the decision was made based on legal issues brought about by political drama, but this part of it isn’t, if you get the distinction.

The only real linux drama part, as far as I can see is the crappy way it was announced, which isn’t what most of the people involved in the drama after the fact are complaining about.

I dunno, I’m not complaining about the post here, just talking about the overall issue itself using the post as a jumping point.

Anyway, I guess what I’m getting at is that foss development can’t be immune from political fuckery (no matter how justified or unjustified it is). Everyone that’s going to be involved in development is going to live under some nation’s thumb, and is vulnerable to any legal ramifications of that nation. So there’s no way to prevent a project being strongarmed; all that’s possible is having enough people that can review the code do so, so that any fuckery that affects the project is known, so that everyone can decide what they want to do about it as individuals.

As long as individual people have the ability to use any foss software they want on their own devices, there’s a limit to how bad the fuckery can get. Tbh, I’m more worried about corporate fuckery in foss projects than governmental

I dunno, the browser lags when I scroll down it.

It’s trivial to build huge ones up. This account is only as old as the reddit bullshit in 23, and I know I’m over a hundred at least.

Humans are assholes. On the internet, they don’t work as hard to pretend they’re not. And, they’ll often go harder at it than anywhere else. So you block a lot if you want to avoid future interactions with the same asshole.

I’m at full geek chub now

Yeah, there may have been some actual boomers in the development somewhere, but the players were definitely skewed hard to gen-x. Even the boomers that did play weren’t in the first wave of players (for the most part), they picked it up afterwards.

You know, seeing these responses with other people having experienced it too is cathartic.

I’ve never met anyone irl that had that kind of dream, and the last time I mentioned it online, nobody popped up that had. It’s nice to know that it isn’t some kind of isolated thing, that it’s not just me being weird.