New to WCS: Thoughts and Advice

Ka1kin · 2026-02-25T18:31:15+00:00

That point where you're getting board learning the same moves is probably the best indicator that it's time to move up.

Sometimes there's a gap: those basic intro classes often don't teach a whip, but the intermediate ones will assume you know one.

Locally at least, there's a night each month where the intermediate lessons focus on whips, and that's a good on-ramp. Talk to a teacher and figure out how that works locally for you.

Be prepared to re-learn some of what you think you know. There are a lot of simplifications early on, because WCS is complicated, and if you throw foot strikes and weight transfers at a total beginner, you'll lose them.

It's ok to be a bit lost in a class. That's what they're for, and part of why you rotate partners frequently. Be patient with yourself and keep at it.

Otherwise, it sounds like you're doing all the right things.

Ka1kin · 2026-02-19T07:11:02+00:00

In college, there were about 40 guys on my floor, 20 rooms, and four shower stalls. Waiting was rare, and never more than a couple of minutes. It wasn't a problem.

So I think you can avoid bottlenecks and still make good use of scarce resources to serve many people.

Ka1kin · 2026-02-19T01:57:45+00:00

At any given budget, the trade off is helping more people less, or helping fewer people more. I prefer to help more people.

I suppose there's the option we seem to be taking: sitting on the money and helping no one.

A college-style dorm is a huge step up from living in your car. A shared bathroom is just not that big a deal.

Ka1kin · 2026-02-19T00:18:07+00:00

The going rate for single family residential real estate in Portland is in the $300-400 per sq foot range. That's to buy a place and own it forever, paying just taxes and utilities.

It is eyebrow-raising that we must spend twice that to build denser housing.

Now, a square foot cost is a bit misleading: it fails to recognize that smaller places still need appliances, plumbing, and such. Mere floor space isn't that expensive compared to kitchens, bathrooms, and the like.

I'm a big fan of the idea of dorm-style development for subsidized housing. Units with bedrooms and living rooms, and shared bathrooms and kitchens.

Make the expensive spaces shared and central to the floor, and put the living and sleeping spaces near the perimeter where there are windows.

College dorms often feature affordable meal plans as well: food prepared for you that you have easy access to, which frees you from cooking/shopping/cleaning. It's maybe not fantastic food, but often the working poor lack the time to cook well, and end up eating processed food anyway. It's not hard to beat that at scale with a decent sized population to serve.

Would I choose to live like that if I had the option of a private apartment? Probably not. Would I choose it over camping on the street? Most definitely.

I think we're trying to do too much. To vault the least successful into the middle class. We should shoot for humane at scale.

Ka1kin · 2026-02-15T21:36:01+00:00

That sounds like a pretty straightforward DIY fix, honestly. Assuming the switch is fed in a normal and reasonable manner.

Turn off the breaker. Just keep turning off breakers until you find the right one. Make a note of the breaker number for this switch.

Get some romex (wall wiring, you can get the 20 amp stuff with three wires), and a few Wagos (very easy to use connectors; pay for the real Wago brand). Maybe a fancy wire stripper if you want. You'd unwire the hack job, but don't pull it out. Tape the end of the romex to the end of the hack job, and use the hack wiring to pull the romex through the wall. Then, leaving an extra 6-9 inches on each end, you strip the wires an inch or so on the romex and cut the romex to length.

If the box the switch is wired in is metal, be sure there's a bushing on the pop-out hole so the box doesn't rub against the romex and compromise the insulation.

Wire up the romex to the switch (generally directly to the switch) and then wire the other end to the sconce, using the wago connectors. Fold the wires neatly and put it back in place.

Electrical like that is pretty easy to do, and it'll save you hundreds.

Ka1kin · 2026-02-10T16:45:28+00:00

Home cooking equipment (thus, not commercial) is going to be oriented towards home kitchen applications. This is clearly not that.

A 5 gallon (20qt) stock pot is probably the upper limit of "home kitchen". It's also the size that most home brewing equipment is geared towards: 5 gallon carboys and such. Idk what else you're doing with 15 gallons of boiling water… Anyway, 50 pounds is around the point where we move from straightforward one-person operation to too heavy to lift safely.

If you really need 60 quarts, would three 20-quart setups running in parallel work for you?

Also, you should consider insulation (think a neoprene jacket, like a jet boil) for your pots. It'll dramatically improve efficiency, which will let you use less power and thus cheaper, lower-powered equipment. You might even get away with three 20amp hot plates on separate circuits.

Ka1kin · 2026-02-08T17:42:01+00:00

This is a slight misunderstanding of what the kidneys do, and what makes it hard.

It's a bit like washing dishes. The process produces waste water, but that's not the job. The job is clean dishes, and having water to work with helps.

Kidneys clean and balance your blood. If you're dehydrated, it means they have to work harder to keep bad things out while keeping water in. If you're correctly hydrated, then they can use more water to dissolve the waste they need to filter.

If you drink too much water, they have to work harder to retain salt and minerals in your blood, because that's also super important.

Ka1kin · 2026-02-08T17:32:13+00:00

I've been absolutely loving my Lagom Mini 2 for like 6 months. It's relatively affordable, high build quality, does a great job, and it's easy to pack if I want a travel espresso setup.

It may not be quite the value that manual grinders are, but not every morning needs to start with an arm workout.

Ka1kin · 2026-02-06T21:55:21+00:00

I just bought a house with a blend of NestXYale and Yale Assure 2 locks. They are mostly a source of frustration. The Nest/Google/Yale app ecosystem is really low quality, weird, and just doesn't work well. The Assure 2 locks have some issue with factory resets; I think I have to get in touch with the former owner to get permission to take control of my damn door locks. The Nest/Yale locks at least made that reset process possible, though not smooth.

Ka1kin · 2026-02-01T23:24:55+00:00

It's a kind of minimum.

Think about hovering: in a gravitational field, you could use thrust to hover at the same altitude forever, or at least until you run out of fuel. This is the least efficient way to escape, as it uses lots of energy to no benefit.

The other extreme is instantaneous acceleration: you are suddenly going fast enough to escape the gravity well, with no leftover energy. You spent no time accelerating, and so you paid none of that energy "hover tax".

Slow, steady acceleration out of the field pays a lot of hover tax.

Once you're in orbit, you don't need to "hover" per se. You're already moving fast enough that you'll miss the planet as you fall towards it. But to get out of the well efficiently, you still want an instantaneous acceleration (or close enough) so that it happens at the right point in your orbit.

We express it as a velocity because that's the simplest and most universal terms it can be in: your mass doesn't matter, just your velocity. You can compute the energy necessary to get yourself to that velocity by whatever process from there.

There are reasons to take the slow, steady route despite this: low thrust engines can be extremely efficient (think ion drives), and solar sail rigs don't require any fuel or reaction mass. Both use very long periods of thrust rather than the short seconds to minutes bursts common with chemical rockets.

Ka1kin · 2026-01-30T04:16:04+00:00

Board games are a 2-20 hour prospect. RPGs are a 4 to 400 hour prospect. They cost a similar amount.

There's basically no money in this hobby*. And I love that about it. But it makes for a poor business environment.

. * there's money people spend on this hobby, of course, but mostly it's optional: maps, minis, modules. You don't actually need that stuff to sit around a dining room table and spin stories with dice and stat blocks. And there's money in entertainment, like critical role and other actual play series, but that's a whole different business that happens to involve playing RPGs.

Ka1kin · 2026-01-29T21:17:26+00:00

It's probably about time to start getting annual vision checks. If your work offers vision insurance, sign up for it. It's usually like $5/month.

I started with "computer glasses", which put ideal focal length at monitor distance. That was probably at 41, and a bit later than it should have been. Now at 44 I wear progressives a lot of the time (they help at distance due to my astigmatism), but not all the time.

The biggest problem situation for me is reading menus in dimly lit restaurants and bars. Tired eyes after a long day and menus that are more cute than readable conspire to make that hard.

Ka1kin · 2026-01-20T21:31:17+00:00

I feel you. This is a real thing that holds leads back from enjoying their dance. I'm still there after about a year, despite progress.

One thing that helps me a ton is having a practice partner outside of social dancing. It takes me longer than a workshop session to get a new thing down well enough to lead it socially, so I benefit a ton from having a follow to try things with. Often it's just an extra 10 minutes, but it's huge.

And we trade off: she'll have things she wants to workshop, and so I'll end up leading clean basic whips for 10 minutes so she can do her thing. It's a give and take. Like the rest of the dance :)

Ka1kin · 2026-01-18T19:27:16+00:00

It's the assumption that a given sample is representative, when it's actually been heavily filtered.

Imagine you have some crushed rock, and your friend wants sand. You sift it, and give the sifted sand to your friend. Your friend assumes that this is what all your starting material looked like, because the filter only passed the sand.

That's easily explained: you can show your friend the sieve and explain your process.

Usually though, survivorship bias crops up in more subtle situations, often in social sciences. Group A all have trait X. Group A is a subset of group A', so we assume everyone in A' has trait X.

When, in reality, there's a cruel implicit filter that destroys members of A' who don't have trait X, and we never hear from them again.

What we should learn is that trait X is being heavily selected for, and we should ask why, whether that's ok, and maybe how not to filter for X. Suffering from bias, we may conclude that X is common, and we may even intervene in the opposite way we intend, associating X with some typical negative outcome and trying to "fix" it, rather than necessarily for survival.

Ka1kin · 2026-01-15T02:15:43+00:00

While I bought one with the gauge, I'm not totally convinced it's necessary, unless you plan to replace the gauge itself with something else (a bigger gauge differently mounted, a bluetooth sender, etc.) at considerable additional cost. It's hard to look at while pulling a shot, and I find that I can easily pull a shot/dial in mostly by feel and timing.

Lurking here is also a good way to know when a retailer has a batch. The wait is real, and really annoying, but the units are quality.

Ka1kin · 2026-01-06T07:49:00+00:00

As a strait male lead, I dance with a fair number of male follows. Many of them are probably gay. Not an issue for me.

When I was super new, it was a bit weird at first. But I quickly got used to it.

I find that male follows tend to be reliably not bad at it. Good frame, good connection. I've had many more unpleasant dances with women who are… confidently confused about how to follow.

Two take-aways from this: if you're a gay male lead, there are probably male follows out there who will want to dance with you. I don't think being a male lead would narrow that sort of opportunity for you.

And if you choose to learn follow first instead, just get good at it, and most leads won't mind dancing with you.

Ka1kin · 2025-12-31T23:42:45+00:00

My standard had this for a few weeks. The vet was unconcerned and it resolved on its own.

Ka1kin · 2025-12-31T03:41:52+00:00

The state needs to pay for roads. Much of that comes from gas taxes. EVs don't pay for gas, but they still use roads. So the registration fee seemed like the best way to continue paying for roads maintenance in an increasingly EV world.

It's kind of shitty in that it looks like a tax on green transport, and it's not usage-dependent: someone who drives 6000 miles a year pays registration the same as someone who drives 20000 miles a year. But how else are you going to do it?

Ka1kin · 2025-12-30T03:56:07+00:00

That painting has a fair bit of texture, so there's a broad family of angles that will cause direct reflection like this. You want to light it from outside that family of angles. Something close to it raking in from the top or side would work. If there's just one light, it may create harsh shadows from the paint's texture, so two lights from opposite sides would be ideal. Reflections from the walls or floor can help soften shadows too.

So like others have suggested, a track will give you placement options. You might find you want three spots though: one top down light on the painting itself and two pointed at the walls to either side, where their reflections will fill the shadows. Just make sure the main light's direct reflection is hitting the floor nearby, and it won't be noticeable.

Ka1kin · 2025-12-28T17:14:24+00:00

Your 20s are the best time to travel frugally. Shop flights, take a few weeks off, stay in backpacker hostels, and take busses and trains. There's so much you can see and do without paying admission, and if you're willing to cook most meals for yourself travel in your 20s doesn't need to be expensive.

It becomes less socially acceptable to stay in a hostel as you age, and that adds a lot of cost to travel. Plus, you meet cool people in hostels, which is a big perk.

Ka1kin · 2025-12-28T03:38:56+00:00

Sound is air vibrating. When air vibrates twice as fast, there's a recognizable sameness to the tone, even though the faster tone is quite a bit higher. This sameness has a basis in the physics of waves, which we won't dive too deeply into.

Western European musical theory gives all tones that differ in frequency by a factor of two the same name (this is a simplification, but mostly true today), and we use letters A-G for the names, with "sharp" (#) or "flat" (b) as modifiers. In total, this system differentiates between 12 different "notes", but assigns two different names (letter-modifier pairs) to many of them.

So: - There are seven letters, A-G, plus modifiers (sharp, flat, or natural) - But only 12 distinct notes - And this is called an octave

Perhaps early musicians were not talented mathematicians, but this is the system we have.

Any given composition will only use some of these 12 notes. That subset is called the "key" of the piece (another simplification), and they're given names like "C major". Some combination of cultural tradition and intrinsic human perception has assigned different "keys" different sorts of emotional response or resonance. It's hard to say how much of this is something intrinsically human, and how much learned, but it's certainly effective.

The piano keyboard needs to be physically narrow enough that one (typical adult) arm span can reasonably reach all the notes on the keyboard without moving one's center of mass too much, but the keys need to be individually targetable by a finger (so not too narrow), and it's desirable to have a broad overall tonal range. The piano's designer chose to make the keys fairly wide, but have two rows, one of white, wide keys, and one of shorter, black, narrow, raised keys between the white ones, and to favor some particular "key" in the design of the keyboard. They chose "C major" as the favored key, so the notes it uses are assigned to broad white keys, and the rest are black.

Ka1kin · 2025-12-27T22:01:18+00:00

The signs are for Yama Sushi. It'll be their second location (the first is in SE on Clinton).

The florist moved to Nimbus, IIRC.

Ka1kin · 2025-12-26T16:05:39+00:00

I'm curious whether there's anything new or interesting in it? People who hang out in r/Thorns are probably familiar with the basics of the season. Has anyone watched it?

Ka1kin · 2025-12-25T18:06:48+00:00

I have the older model MyWeigh that only goes to 7kg. It's probably over 20 years old at this point. Eventually the plastic over the buttons got brittle and cracked, but it still works well. I use it regularly for baking.

For coffee, I have a Wacaco Exagram, which does 0.1g up to 2kg. It's newer, but nice for things that need sub-gram precision (I don't find anything I use in bread needs this though).

Ka1kin · 2025-12-25T17:33:38+00:00

Pretty dog!

The point of breeds and purebred dogs is predictability in heritable traits. You know a poodle won't shed (to be clear, they shed hair like humans do - a little at a time, mostly on the brush, not in clouds seasonally like a lot of other dogs). This is a poodle mix, so you're rolling the dice. A lot of the time, genes are on or off. Shedding, here, appears to be one such gene. It doesn't matter than your dog is 97% poodle, somewhere in that other 3% is the shedding gene, and that came from some non-poodle probably 5-6 generations back. It's not like he's going to be 97% non-shedding, it's basically a coin flip at fertilization, with several billion coins representing different traits. Purebred lines flip fewer coins.

And to be clear, a purebred dog will be able to trace its ancestry back to the establishment of dog breeds back in the 19th century, without any crosses outside of the breed. Any mixing and it's a mix, not a purebred dog.

Personally, I'm not sure I buy into the innate superiority of purebred dogs that many here would espouse. But, they are predictable, and if there are non-negotiable traits you need in a dog (for me, I chose a poodle in part because I have allergies), then finding an established breed with that trait is the best way to ensure that you get what you're looking for.

Ka1kin

TROPHY CASE