Listen! Listen! The Cats Pissin… Where! Where! Under The Chair…

Oh, I would so like to peruse this ‘test’. Anyone have a copy?

‘Trial Of Thunder (5-3)’ from the ‘Crypt of the Necrodancer’ (Metal Soundtrack). I’m not a fan of this type of game and have never played it, but Familyjules totally shreds the original 8-bit soundtrack it had.

The grain size is small enough. and you appear to be pouring upside down (thumbs up). I think all along it was only the vibration. You may have a breakout. Hard to use last pour for a volumetric comparison if the mix ratio changed. Yeah, I hope it went well.

Weighing and adjusting for temp/ph is also key. These control the chemical reaction and thus the end result.

Hi. I’m a refractory designer. I have over 30 years of experience in creating linings for industrial furnaces with bricks and monolithics, including what we would call ‘Precast shapes’ of which this would be included.

Those are definitely air pockets stemming from the pour that were not vibrated out. It could be your aggregate size is making it difficult. I don’t know the product you are using, but often there are ‘fine’ versions that feature a smaller grain size just for better consistency when pouring. I would never recommend gunning something like this.

As far as vibration goes, they sell industrial vibrators with long rubber mixing tips. I might have video from a few of my precast shapes showing a large precast shape getting vibrated. Everything about it just screams dildo and you feel silly, but it is what it is, and it does work.

You’ll know if you add too much water. It will be brittle and fail if you can even get the mold released. More water is never a solution. Better PH is superior to more water.

Vibration can be achieved by building an outer box for your foam insert. Wood can work for something this size probably, but metal would be best. You can then use any vibratory method that works. Pour direction matters too, but it opens ugly doors like lifting and drying.

Isn’t that how Poltergeist 1 started?

Oh my god! It’s the person I was hoping for. Thank you, thank you, thank you! You definitely answered a few questions I had (drying, storing, prep) and you organized it very well for me.

I learned how to handle it without gloves when I was young. It was customary at every camping trip to pick some and put it into someone else’s sleeping bag on the sly. Hilarious fun.

And my opinion, wood nettle is way more armed than stinging.

Stinging nettle originated in Europe while wood nettle originated in North America. The stinging variety is a much older breed with a much increased potency. Having said that, I do keep finding tons of wood nettle on my excursions. Stinging nettle remains elusive.

The plan would be to plant in early spring, harvest tops in a few weeks with the remainder going to fertilizer. Rinse and repeat until it gets too hot. Eventually I would have to let one go to seed to replenish stock.

As I said below, I don’t care for spinach so I’m betting I find them both to taste like cuck. But it would be nice if the allergies relent.

Tried a daily spoonful honey a few times in my life. Didn’t help my allergies either time. I tried it a second time as a digestion aid, but didn’t notice much difference either.

It’s delicious though. I was told that eating the honeycomb is the best way to go if you want health benefits, but I dislike the texture.

It allegedly has incredible nutritional value with the dioica type argued to be a superfood. Vitamins A, B, C and K. Calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium and a lot of other very beneficial nutrients.

I’m told for optimum flavor and benefit, you have to harvest it early in spring when the leaves are still actively growing and well before flowers develop. Additionally, harvesting only the top (4) leaf segments for consumption gives you the ‘prime rib’ of the plant while leaving the lower portion to survive to flower and reseed itself. Harvesting it young, it will not be stringy from woody growth, and will still contain all of the stored energy for upcoming fruit production. Once cooked, the formic acid in the trichomes (toxin and stinger) is destroyed and it can be consumed. It can replace spinach in just about any recipe. It supposedly has a nutty flavor. I’m not after it for flavor. I dislike spinach.

It also has histamine receptor blocking properties, allegedly providing relief to hay fever. I don’t know of anyone personally to ask if it’s true, but there are many people promoting them now. Frankly, every year older I get, the worse my allergies get. If it does help, it’s worth it to me. If it does nothing, I’m no worse off than I was.

There are even other alleged health benefits as well. Blood pressure, thyroid, liver, prostate effects. None of it I could confirm or deny. I’m just after allergy relief.

Yeah, I hear the root systems have some personality, hence I’m thinking containers. I was told good drainage and high nitrogen soil are key. They’ll take full sun to partial shade, though too much shade makes them grow too tall and they usually fall over.

The cucumbers really, REALLY, seemed to like the nettle fertilizer. It was quite impressive. They’d been doing well considering the over abundance of rain we’ve had, but that stuff really kicked it into gear. I was so impressed with the results that I think I’m going to try the medicinal tea.

If anyone got them in the Pittsburgh area, I’ll come out to cut them down for you. I’m heading out again today to forage for seeds. If any kind soul has some extra seeds to part with I’d be grateful. A lot of places are sold out until fall.

As a professional 35 year draftsman, I would recommend you buy an 11x17 gridded notepad, a pencil, an eraser, and then make numerous sketches. Do an plan view of each floor to create the general arrangement and the room-to-room relationships. Sections will be required at each elevation to show heights. Then sketch each room on its own sheet. Here you can supply more detail, using matchlines, etc. In this manner, you don’t have to bear the burden of drafting and accuracy until you are behind the screen. You can just sketch the idea, and provide the numerics. Sketches need not be pretty or to scale or made by someone with any drafting talent at all. Use placeholders. A square with ‘TLT’ in it is just fine for a toilet. Later, the sketches can be redrawn in cad via a scaled floorplan and your placeholders detailed as required. This is generally how I would proceed when I had to draw up large steel furnaces in which the OEM drawings were lost.

With that in mind, Id suggest paying cash to someone else that has cad software and knows it. This is not a large or even complex project. They can take your sketches and recreate them into a 2d drawing set assuming you did your sketches right. While it will be a great accuracy check, I recommend this just so you don’t have to run CAD on Linux, an endeavor that is sure to cost you that cash in time and frustration alone. It’s just not suited for the heavy throughputs of CAD.

Consider this. If your choice of tools does not matter, you could replace your screwdriver with a butter knife for this renovation. As well you could use a rock in place of a hammer or some eco-friendly hemp string in lieu of your tape measure. If the choice of operating system, the base for all software to run on, is a negligible detail you may as well remove your foundation while you are at it. It’s just going to crack and leak in 200 years or so.

If you don’t know any starving draftsman or doing it yourself is an additional goal, then at least go buy a cheapie beater windows laptop and get a mainstream cad software, even if it’s free. You’ll be needing something mainstream to get good search results as you learn to run it.

And please, if this comes off as rude, I assure you that it’s borne from my first hand experience. CAD drafting is not difficult, but it is tricky. There will be many moments where things can get off the tracks without you realizing it. It’s disheartening to say the least when you realize that many minutes, hours or days ago you punched a bad number, misread something, phone rang and you got distracted, etc. And then when that happens, you have to know how to fix it since some of the drawing is right and some is now wrong, and a wrong drawing isn’t necessarily worth the paper it’s printed on. A good cad guy will avoid most of these traps for you entirely.

Of course they were. There’s no way that that many people refused to vote for her after her boy Biden took peoples homes and securities, and killed the economy, became an international embarrassment and the worst president ever. It had nothing to do with her partying like there’s no urgency while everything burned, even being piss drunk to the point where she couldn’t convey a clear idea of a future at her own assemblies. It totally couldn’t be that the average person, a good person more than willing to entertain the notion of a woman for president, looked at her and saw anything but someone they would call a woman or a president.

I for one think we all deserved better from both parties. The real problem to get addressed should be when a two party system breaks down by both parties running an extremist in which neither represent the majority of the people all that well. ‘Better than the others’ is not always a good thing in and of itself as we are all right now (and yet again) witnessing the results of more poor leadership on a spectacularly global level. Well, except for Finland I suppose. Maybe we should hire them to come in and run things for us while we sort shit out. Maybe Lordi can help.

I happen to be working in a major grocery store right now that draws from UNFI for 75% of our product. Our shelves are far from bare, but our deliveries have been affected. Certainly, stock quantities are only going down. I did not receive any stock Monday. I was told they took our order from a prior Wednesday and resubmitted it for delivery this Wednesday, but it did not arrive. An order is in place for tomorrow, but again, we didn’t shoot it so they must be using sales estimates or another prior order. I hope it shows up, but its not likely I’ll be getting it (a truck is scheduled but with no eta).

We have other suppliers and are drawing additional items from them where we can, but they cannot quell the full demand in either quantity or diversity.

I’m surprised they had no backup system in place. That was incredibly unwise and irresponsible considering it is food chain related. Funny how banks are too big to fail, but not food suppliers.

A few that come to mind

2022 - Lovecraftian Horror/Dark Comedy/Fantasy - Glorious

2019 - Mystery/Horror/Thriller/- The Colour Out Of Space (or Color Out Of Space)

2015 - Action/Violence/Scifi - Hardcore Henry

2010 - Action/Violence - Machete

2010 - Action/Comedy/Romance - Scott Pilgrim Vs The World

2009 - Zombie Horror/Dark Comedy - George: A Zombie Intervention (or George’s Intervention)

2009 - Adventure/Fantasy/Scifi - Ink

1999 - Adventure/Comedy/Fantasy - Dogma

1997 - Action/Adventure/Scifi - The Game

All were really good movies that I myself initially passed over (numerous times even) before coming back a while later to be blown away on the first watch. Most of these I ordered on dvd as the credits were still rolling. I can list some more if you like any of these.

I think that ALL fiction has to inherit a certain amount of propaganda as a side effect of the idea being created, much like rounding off a number inherently reduces it’s accuracy. Additionally, some fiction can be a better conveyance for propaganda, and I think Star Trek is likely one of the best at it. It’s set in the future which gives it a blank canvas for maps, races, politics and technology. Nothing has to be real or provable because it’s set in the future and can’t be confirmed. They took advantage of this too by creating a pretty rich and detailed world far far different from our own. This drastic difference amplifies the propaganda effect and makes it more obvious. I think you could go watch Sesame Street or any other fictionalized show and walk away with some sort of idea.

Just west of Pittsburgh, PA - Region 6. I was pretty young but my grandfather’s garden and orchard were legendary.

The garden bore nothing too exotic. Tomato, cucumber, zucchini, beans, cabbage, potato, lettuce, carrot, onion, radish. The usual suspects.

His apple trees (maybe 12) did fantastic. Unsure of type but it was a baking apple. There was always a glut of apples in the fall. They had a grainy flesh as compared to a non-baking apple. They were still quite delicious to eat right off the tree.

He also had a plum and a pear tree that both did well for many years. Again, I am unsure on the breed. The pear I remember in my head looked a lot like a bosc. It bore pears that were smaller than a grocery stores. They were brownish not the standard yellow or green. Very sweet though.

Not trees, but Pennsylvania grapes, rhubarb, black raspberries, red raspberries, blackberries and strawberries were also quite productive for many years. Particularly the red raspberries of which he had like 30 bushes, so you could eat your fill and take a to-go bag. Mind the Japanese beetles. So good and such a good memory.

Peaches though wrecked my grandfather. If it wasn’t blight, it was disease, birds, bugs, bores or drought. All he wanted was an unmottled peach. Never did ever happen despite his best efforts.

Cherries did a number on him too. The birds were just too hard to beat. Chaotic little shits would eat the unripened fruit.

Oh, and I wanted to ask you a specific (or anyone else for that matter). Feel free to tell me to pound it sideways if you don’t know.

When I was looking up the Port Albert, I also discovered a sort-of kin to it called a ‘Lemon Cucumber’. Are they any good?

Yes, this is one I hear a lot. It’s likely going to be a finalist.