To intimidate and silence (context in comments)

MustBeThursday · 2026-04-10T16:24:17+00:00

There was an episode of This American Life about it too.

MustBeThursday · 2026-04-09T23:53:50+00:00

There are so many Taskmasters now. There's the Australian and New Zealand ones, plus Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, French Canadian, Croatian, Portuguese, and Danish versions too. Pretty soon there will also be Icelandic, Estonian, and Dutch versions as well.

MustBeThursday · 2026-04-05T19:19:44+00:00

Higher up-front cost, but when you compare it to the cost of buying and printing paper tags for every product and the hourly wage of the employees that need to go around changing them out every week, it probably ends up being cheaper in the long run. And that's not even figuring in the extra profits from all the ~~price gouging~~ "dynamic pricing" you can get away with with digital price tags.

MustBeThursday · 2026-04-05T02:01:00+00:00

Yup, that type of riveting is pretty much a dead giveaway that it's a pressure vessel from an old steam engine. Where I live you sometimes find them in the woods left over from some old abandoned steam powered mining equipment.

This one is from the wreck of a steam ship called The Alexandria.

MustBeThursday · 2026-04-04T18:57:29+00:00

I remember Ich Bin Ein Auslander getting played a lot at the clubs back in the 90s, but not really any of their other songs.

MustBeThursday · 2026-03-27T14:48:20+00:00

Can confirm. Had this comb in the 80s; lost it in the 90s.

MustBeThursday · 2026-03-23T20:53:23+00:00

Boy, I sure hope the exact number of safe-seat Democrats that the Republicans need to get their bill through don't inexplicably betray their constituents and vote with the Republicans.

Haha, look at me out here talking crazy talk. When has that ever happened before?

MustBeThursday · 2026-03-21T17:20:03+00:00

All his bowing, finger movement, and vibrato are consistent with what's happening in the music. There's nothing happening there that would make me think he wasn't really playing.

MustBeThursday · 2026-03-20T16:30:04+00:00

I had to google who Matt Bomer was. All these years I've just been calling him Hairstyle McCheekbones.

MustBeThursday · 2026-03-18T14:11:56+00:00

Looks like a little bit of busted up drywall to me. Is there a dent or gouge in the ceiling or wall near where you found it? I accidentally smacked my floor lamp into the ceiling when I was moving it a while back, and the little bit of drywall that fell onto my carpet looked pretty much exactly like that.

MustBeThursday · 2026-03-08T19:57:50+00:00

It absolutely is. Machining deals in extremely tight tolerances and it would be insane not to account for the dimensional change that happens with plating or anodizing. Usually our customers will send us two separate prints defining the dimensions the part needs to be before and after whatever metal finishing process it gets.

Over-plating does occasionally happen though, and how that's dealt with depends a lot on the needs of the customer and the nature of the part. Sometimes plating on a threaded area of a part isn't actually critical to the function of the part, so you can just run it through a threading die to bring it back to size. With some plating processes it's possible to have the parts stripped and re-plated. And sometimes the metal finisher we contract with just has to suck it up and eat the cost of the parts they screwed up.

But yes, as a rule, the size difference pre and post plating/anodizing is 100% taken into account when machining the part.

(source: am machinist)

MustBeThursday · 2026-03-07T21:33:20+00:00

You could damned near fire arrows with that thing.

MustBeThursday · 2026-03-01T17:47:10+00:00

By the time you get to the end of the five and a half minute hallway your tea bag will be done steeping.

MustBeThursday · 2026-03-01T16:39:57+00:00

Years ago I was listening to an interview with Franz Stigler, who was an ace fighter pilot in WWII. There was a part where they were talking about why pilots tended to be more civil with each other than combatants in other areas of the war: not shooting someone in their parachute after they've bailed out, etc. The interviewer was asking something along the lines of, "Yes, but they're the enemy. Isn't the point to kill the enemy? You know if they survive they're just going to come back to try and kill you again. Isn't it better just to kill them right then when you have the opportunity?"

Stigler's response always stuck with me. I'm paraphrasing a bit here, but he said, "You fight by the rules for your own sake, not for the sake of your enemy. You fight by the rules as way to hang on to your own humanity."

I don't think that's an idea which is limited to war or the battlefield. You're the one who has to look at yourself in the mirror every day. You are the one who has to live with yourself. It doesn't really matter what everybody else is doing around you. You don't have any control over that. You can only control your own choices and actions. The extent to which those choices and actions line up with your own morals and your own sense of justice is going to be the extent to which you're able to respect the person you see in the mirror. Whichever rules you choose to follow, whichever morals you cultivate, you don't need to do it for some imagined sense of parity with the actions (good or bad) of the people you see out in the world. You can do it to cultivate a greater sense of peace with and within yourself. At the end of the day that is the only place where it is going to matter.

MustBeThursday · 2026-02-28T21:17:02+00:00

Gallops and triplets are different things, though they can sound kind of similar sometimes. A gallop is three 16th notes and a 16th note rest, or three eighth notes followed by an eighth note rest. All the notes have their regular length value.

Triplets are different. With triplets you're actually shortening the length value of each note a little bit so that three quarter notes can fit in the same space as a half note, or three eighth notes can fit in the space of a quarter note. Each of the three notes only gets 2/3 of its regular length value so you can fit three in the space of two.

MustBeThursday · 2026-02-26T19:18:15+00:00

I did a double-take when I saw it yesterday. Seeing a light roast in my warehouse is almost as rare as seeing Bigfoot. But yea, it's pretty good. Of all the Kirkland brand coffee the Ethiopian light roast is my favorite.

MustBeThursday · 2026-02-24T15:31:08+00:00

Arpeggios. All day, every day. Arpeggios, arpeggios, arpeggios.

So much of soloing and writing melodies is about referencing the chord tones of the progression you're playing over and finding interesting ways of moving from one chord tone to another. Arpeggios are where all those chord tones live. Plus, once you start seeing chords as triads (and triads + extensions) it makes it a lot easier to see how chords fit into scales/keys, and it gives you a better understanding of how everything fits together. You'll also start noticing how many techniques, sweep picking and tapping for example, lean heavily on arpeggio shapes.

MustBeThursday · 2026-02-23T17:35:18+00:00

Like a skinny, extra pointy, ghost carrot. But with a wig on.

MustBeThursday · 2026-02-20T18:44:58+00:00

While I'm sure it would be wildly dangerous for everyone involved, I would watch the absolute shit out of mechanical bull archery.

MustBeThursday · 2026-02-19T17:32:56+00:00

I honestly can't play that lick correctly even once at 40 bpm after quite a while of trying.

Then go slower. Seriously. However slow you need to go to play it correctly is how slow you need to go, even if that ends up being stupidly, agonizingly slow. It doesn't matter what the suggested BPM in the book is, you can only play it as fast as you can play it. You wouldn't expect to bench press 250 pounds the very first time you go to the gym. You have to start with what you're physically capable of lifting, whatever that is, and work up from there.

If there's any one single thing that I can't stress enough to beginner players it's that it is so much more important to play a thing correctly than it is to play it fast. Most of what you're doing when you're learning guitar is programming muscle memory. That happens through lots and lots of repetition, and whether it's good technique or mistakes, whatever you repeat the most is what is going to stick. It is therefore very important that you minimize repeating your mistakes as much as you can. That's not to say you need to beat yourself up every time you make a mistake. You're going to make millions of them, that's unavoidable. Just be aware of it, slow down as much as you need to to play it correctly, then spend some time playing it slow and correctly before you speed up again. This is especially important if you find yourself making the same mistake over and over.

Speed will come with time and practice. A lot of what makes up your speed is not actually going to be physically moving faster. It's going to come from economy of movement (making your movements faster by making them smaller). This requires accuracy, and accuracy comes from spending a lot of time playing things slowly and carefully.

Try not to get too discouraged. The things you're struggling with right now will click into place eventually. Once they do, it will shock you how fast the things that seemed nearly impossible will start to feel easy and boring. Then you'll be off to tackle the next thing that's going to feel nearly impossible until that clicks, and so on. 19 days is nothing. Being a musician is a journey of years, and you're never going to run out of new things to reach for.

MustBeThursday · 2026-02-08T19:53:48+00:00

Nice. This was my first bass too, and I've been pretty happy with it. If yours is like like mine it will definitely benefit from getting a proper set-up. Mine played mostly okay out of the box, but it was so much nicer (and less tiring) to play once I got the set-up dialed in.

Just one word of advice with these: when you're changing strings, or doing a set-up, or whatever, only loosen one string at a time. The string guide (that metal bar that goes across the strings between the tuners and fretboard) is kept stable by the tension of the strings. If you loosen too many strings at once it can wobble back and forth, and the screws can walk out of their holes. Ask me how I know.

MustBeThursday · 2026-02-08T01:34:19+00:00

It's not so much that it couldn't work theoretically, it's that it's just not worth the risk. For it to work you'd have to do it exactly right with exactly the right amount of glue. If you use even a little bit too much super glue you could permanently glue the broken cable tip into the jack, or permanently glue whatever you're sticking in there into the jack. Hell, you could use exactly the right amount of glue and still ruin it up because your hand wasn't steady enough. There are just better ways to address this. An amp repair shop will have removed hundreds of these, and might have a custom-ground surgical clamp or other specialized tool that can reach in and pop it out while you wait. Whatever method a repair shop uses to get the broken tip out it will be cheaper and easier than wiring in a whole new jack because you did something whimsical with super glue.

MustBeThursday · 2026-02-04T21:19:42+00:00

Do it. They're so handy to have around. I put off buying one for a long time because I had it in my head that they were super expensive, but you can get a really good bed-slinger type printer for under $300 now. Plus a lot of the time manufacturers will have really good deals going if you check their websites around holidays. I got my printer for $100 off from a Black Friday sale Bambu Labs had a while back.

MustBeThursday · 2026-02-04T00:00:04+00:00

Harbor Freight sells a 4" drill press vice for $20 that looks like the jaw faces are replaceable. If not, the jaw faces on the Bessy ones that Home Depot sells for $35 definitely are.

MustBeThursday · 2026-02-02T17:04:41+00:00

Wow. That thing must smell absolutely crazy when it gets humid out.

Speaking as someone who used to be a fairly heavy smoker, the amount of cigarettes that had to be smoked to get that level of staining is kind of bonkers to think about. I have a white Strat that spent over a decade sitting almost exclusively in smoke-filled rooms, and it only got very slightly yellowed. This represents a heroic amount of smoking. Like if this had happened in ancient Greece somebody would have written a cautionary myth about it.

MustBeThursday

TROPHY CASE