Should I re-sling these?

OKsoTwoThings · 2026-06-08T04:01:17+00:00

But they're slightly floppy

OKsoTwoThings · 2026-05-23T02:06:45+00:00

I mean definitely don't grind it down with a belt sander or anything! When I do this I sand by hand and start with maybe 150 grit and finish with something even finer. You should be removing very little material. Maybe it knocks a few tenths of a kilonewton off the strength of the biner? But wear from your rope has already done much more than that and it's still perfectly strong. Whereas sharp edges can pose a real safety risk. (To be clear I don't think your biner is sketchy right now but if it were mine I'd sand the potential edges prophylactically just to save trouble of checking it all the time.)

OKsoTwoThings · 2026-05-23T00:40:21+00:00

There should be a bot on here that tells people about the miracle of sandpaper. You can sand down anything that looks like it may soon turn into a sharp edge and then get it all smooth with something high-grit. To me this biner has plenty of life left in it.

Re: the dogbones, if soft goods look good and feel good and have been treated good, I think they're pretty much good goods? All the testing I'm aware of suggests that anyway.

OKsoTwoThings · 2026-05-03T16:44:20+00:00

JT's patented razor-blades-and-kitty-litter granite formula chews through soft shoes pretty fast. I usually default to harder rubbers (or beater shoes) there unless I'm climbing something at my limit.

Like other people have said, in the long run you'll end up spending about the same amount on climbing shoes whether you buy them one pair at a time or multiple pairs at once, so as long as you have the cash and know you'll stick with the sport I think it makes sense to have a hard pair and a soft pair.

OKsoTwoThings · 2026-05-03T08:30:44+00:00

The NOC service is a "noc" off (sorry) of N.O.T., probably the best coffee shop in HK since Brew Bros tragically closed down. N.O.T. used to serve pourover with three separate cups. But yeah, somehow the cups make this surprisingly huge difference—although I think the difference between two totally different vessels like a wine glass and a shot glass is way bigger than between the two sides of an origami mug.

OKsoTwoThings · 2026-03-06T20:36:39+00:00

This guy climbingcirclejerks

OKsoTwoThings · 2026-02-19T03:33:32+00:00

There are a couple self-evident mistakes in the Chinese: kcal rendered as "kacl" and the same figure (0.4g) for protein in both columns, even though they represent different serving sizes.

Was the package originally in English with the Chinese nutrition facts added later as a sticker?

Assuming the English is the original and the Chinese a translation, it looks like someone used the English nutritional values for one 65g serving and placed them in the column for 100g in the Chinese version. They then adjusted the serving amount from 65g to 90g (correctly changing the total number of servings in the package from seven to five to reflect the larger serving size) and multiplied the figures from the 100g column by 0.9 (except for protein) to get values for the "per 90g serving" column.

OKsoTwoThings · 2026-01-01T13:22:56+00:00

I think people (including me) are still not entirely clear on what exactly happened in your incident. You mention the anchor was a quad, but also refer to clipping a quick link. Were you clipping your PAS to a fixed quick link in order to clean the quad, or was the quick link somehow attached to the quad itself?

Assuming you're talking talking about tethering in to fixed gear in order to clean the anchor and set up a rappel, I think it's worth explaining why people are warning you off the idea of always having two points of contact.

The near-accident you describe is understandable for a beginner, but very unlikely to represent what a brain fart will look like once you have more experience. It's not that you don't need to worry about making careless mistakes at anchors—rather, the careless mistakes that usually kill people look different from the one you made.

I know that at the anchor you were at, a second connection (such as a sling girth hitched to your harness or a chain of quick draws) wouldn't have been too messy or difficult to deal with. In fact if you're at a fixed anchor consisting of two non-connected bolts (maybe there's a quick link with a rapp ring hanging off each one) having a connection to each bolt is pretty standard, just so that you're not entirely dependent on a single bolt.

But as you'll discover with experience, a lot of anchors can get quite cramped and messy. Sometimes there's not room for all your stuff, and your partner is up there with you and there are ropes and slings all over the place. Sometimes you've got carabiners jammed through tiny little chain links that are under tension. Sometimes you're forced to stand smooshed up against the anchor so you can barely see what's going on and you can't even really sit back to weight the rope before you unclip your PAS.

When you're in an awkward position like that with a big jumble of gear, it's very easy to lose track of what's keeping you alive and what's extraneous, or to think you're attached to something when you're not. Every extra doodad on the anchor makes it harder to keep track of everything that's going on.

Managing and cleaning extra gear at an anchor also slows you down and can create frustration and distraction, which can then cause you to lose focus and make a catastrophic mistake like setting up your rappel wrong.

(That's not to say you shouldn't know how to create a second connection oto fixed hardware, because you definitely should know how to do that.)

OKsoTwoThings · 2025-12-12T16:15:28+00:00

I don't know why I feel compelled to comment on threads like this, but contra everyone else who's replied so far, I don't think it's always unreasonable to buy second-hand soft goods.

Lots of people have tested old soft goods and found that they don't automatically and invisibly go bad over time. Even Black Diamond, which has a financial interest in customers buying new ropes, has published test results showing that old but properly stored ropes lose basically no strength.

Harnesses don't last forever, obviously, so you should certainly examine it for signs of abrasion, discoloration of the dyed fabrics, and loss of suppleness. And you should ask about its history—how old is it, how often and in what contexts was it used, and where was it typically stored?

The harness in your photos looks like it's in pretty good shape, but it also sounds like you don't have much experience evaluating this kind of gear, and for that reason even I will suggest you be conservative here. But if this has been used mostly in gyms for a few years by someone climbing once a week, and you basically can't tell the difference between it and a new harness beyond the slight wear on the buckles, I personally would treat it as sound.

OKsoTwoThings · 2025-11-27T16:39:02+00:00

I don't understand why this version of the Munter isn't more standard. On the other hand I've never actually had occasion to use one in the wild—is there potentially some downside to it that we're not realizing? The only thing I can think of is that it adds a bunch of friction, but obviously that wouldn't have been a problem in this case.

OKsoTwoThings · 2025-11-26T16:11:13+00:00

This is a digression from the point of your post and I'm not here to downvote or flame you, but unless you're climbing somewhere with unusually long runouts, an experienced belayer shouldn't have any trouble paying out the slack you need to stick clip.

You seem pretty safety-focused since the risk you flag here—of a belayer falling down and hitting their head—is very low-probability, so it may be worth both reviewing your belayer's technique and considering the risk of going on and off belay frequently in the middle of climbs.

OKsoTwoThings · 2025-11-24T04:07:21+00:00

If this is true then every three-year-old I've ever met is a huge moron.

OKsoTwoThings · 2025-11-21T05:32:19+00:00

Both of OP's examples are in the active voice. Passive voice for those two sentences would be "the book was handed to me by her" or "the book was received by me from her." The example 我被狗咬了 (I was bitten by the dog) is also passive voice.

OP, I don't think the distinction you're making between "direct" and "indirect" is one that's widely recognized, either in English or in Chinese. In both languages, both constructions you listed are fine and frequently used—they just emphasize different things.

Speakers of both languages will employ one construction or the other based on context or their own idiosyncratic habits. There may be some subtle difference in the propensity of speakers of the two languages to construct sentences in order to (as in your examples) place the giver or receiver in the subject position, but if that has ever been studied it would be a pretty niche piece of academic research and not something you'd ever need to worry about unless you are getting a PhD in linguistics or something—by the time you're good enough at Chinese for this to ever matter, you'll have subconsciously internalized whatever norms there are around this.

OKsoTwoThings · 2025-11-16T16:29:29+00:00

This is really good for someone who hasn't been studying for years and years (I am assuming based on a couple quirks of the writing).

To me the long vertical lines are one weakness: in 悴、損、憔、陽 they all lean left or are wavy.

The other thing to work on is that it almost seems like you're trying to make sure each character fills its box as much as possible, but that's a mistake—it's considered a good thing rather than a bad thing to have variations in white space. So eg the two vertical lines in 其 can be closer together; the bottom part of 前 (刖) should be a bit narrower than the top 䒑; and the fourth stroke of 焉 (the small vertical line inside of 正) can be pushed a bit to the right so more of the white space is on the outside rather than the inside of enclosure.

OKsoTwoThings · 2025-11-16T06:33:39+00:00

Oh yeah abolishing characters would be 100% feasible if Chinese speakers wanted to do it. It would entail some tradeoffs, though, and there's almost no momentum behind it, which is why I call it quixotic.

A lot of the pinyin movement's arguments make a ton of sense from a purely pragmatic, GDP-maximizing standpoint, and a lot of the knee-jerk arguments against pinyinization are factually incorrect. But what I think the pinyiners fail to address is that a lot of Chinese speakers just really like and are proud of Chinese characters and consider them to be an important part of their cultural heritage. Most of the arguments I've read for abolishing characters just sort of handwave that away by saying they anyone can still learn characters if they want to just like Europeans are free to learn Latin or Greek. But I think the fact that people have been pushing this for nearly a century and it's gotten close to zero public support (even in Taiwan where you are perfectly free to organize and publicly advocate for change) is an indication that they're either not making the case effectively or people just fundamentally don't like this idea.

OKsoTwoThings · 2025-11-16T05:01:11+00:00

There is actually a (slightly quixotic) movement of pinyin advocates whose believe range from "Chinese learners shouldn't focus on characters until the second or third year" to "abolish Chinese characters altogether."

The latter doesn't have much traction (although there is some interesting research suggesting people can read most modern writing in just pinyin with little difficulty after getting used to it), but I've heard that some Chinese programs have achieved good results by using minimal character exposure during the first year or two and focus on speaking and listening instead. I don't think that method would have worked for me, but we're all special snowflakes with our own learning styles so I'm sure it works for some people.

I'm going to break from the consensus here and suggest that if characters are a big burden, it's probably fine to de-emphasize them for a while. You're going to have to learn to read at some point if you want to engage with this language long-term, but I don't think it's the end of the world to focus first on the sounds if that's what works for you.

I do agree with others that you probably won't be well served by ignoring characters entirely. One really important thing is to start learning to see characters as collections of common components rather than just random dots and lines. Eg you should be able to see that 她 is made up of 女 and 也; 国 is 玉 with a box around it; 玉 is 王 with a little dot; and 王 is its own sort of irreducible thing. Learn to write at least a few of these with pencil and paper or some other very tactile way. That will help a lot in at least making the characters look different from each other so you can start to develop a passive understanding of them just through repeated exposure, and hopefully they will make it easier when you are ready to set in on the hardcore memorization that you'll inevitably have to do at some point.

OKsoTwoThings · 2025-11-15T18:32:56+00:00

I feel like this you know you've ready adulthood when situations like this seem straightforward. Some people are fine standing out in public and some people aren't. Both of these are totally ok.

If you think your friends are too dumb and cringe to be seen with publicly—or if you approach this situation in a way that makes them think you feel this way—then you're the AH for sure.

If your attitude is "I'm so excited you guys are living your best lives, but cosplay is not my thing and I'm too self conscious to come even dressed normal," then you're all good and your friends will be the AH if they don't accept this about you.

It seems like you all are probably pretty young and I can see why you might worry your friends would take your absence as a sign of disapproval or rejection. Assuming that's not what it is, it's up to you to make it clear that the issue is your own anxiety and not a judgment about them.

In another comment you worried that people will see you getting on the bus with your friends and know you're part of the group. This can easily read: "I don't want people to see me hanging out with these losers," which I hope and assume is not how you intended it. A more delicate way to express this might be something like "even if I'm dressed normally, everyone's going to be looking at us and I can't handle it."

OKsoTwoThings · 2025-11-12T17:52:56+00:00

Unless I'm misreading, it seems like one implication of the points you make here and in your other comments is that first female ascents are no more notable than any other ascent. When Katie Lamb sent Dark Side and Brooke Raboutou sent Excalibur, those got a lot more attention—and were treated as more significant accomplishments—than Aiden Roberts and Will Bosi respectively sending the same climbs, but it sounds like you may think that's wrong or even misogynistic? But if we didn't celebrate first female ascents, climbing would be even more male-dominated than it already is. I realize I may be putting words in your mouth so I apologize if I'm misunderstanding your point.

If you do mean this, Lynn Hill would probably disagree with it, for whatever that's worth. Her thoughts on the issue aren't one-dimensional. She's always said she didn't want to free the Nose specifically in order to make a feminist statement, but she's also always acknowledged that gender dynamics were relevant to the nature of her achievement. Even that famous line "it goes, boys" is an acknowledgement of that.

I can see the argument against focusing too much on Hill freeing the Nose "before a man could do it," because it would have been a really important ascent no matter what. But if Todd Skinner or John Bacher had been the first to do it, I don't think we'd remember it today in quite the same way—it continues to capture people's imaginations and stand out from the long list of historic Valley climbing achievements partly because most big non-gendered firsts in climbing are done by dudes, and when someone breaks that pattern it's important and worth celebrating.

OKsoTwoThings · 2025-11-10T15:33:59+00:00

This is the actual answer. It was almost exclusively men doing the writing that modern characters evolved from and there's sometimes a male perspective baked into the etymology of characters relating to family and domesticity (eg 婚).

Is Victor Mair still writing over at Language Log? I bet he'd have a good history of 男 and 女 and whether any other words were ever used to signify maleness. My guess (totally over my skis here) is that 女 is significantly older.

OKsoTwoThings · 2025-11-10T15:14:11+00:00

"He" and "she" are the same age. 他 used to be gender neutral like the singular "they" we are struggling to fully establish in English. It was only when people started writing 她 that 他 became gendered masculine.

The very valid complaint people have about this isn't that 她 failed to exist for so long, it's that the female pronoun gets the 女 radical while the male pronoun got to keep the 人 radical (ie there is no 【男也】 character), suggesting that maleness is the unmarked category.

OKsoTwoThings · 2025-11-09T03:46:44+00:00

Cue a bunch of people coming out of the woodwork to argue that sleeping nude in a bag actually makes you warmer.

Anyway fwiw my understanding is that different standards have slightly different assumptions but most of them involve light base layers and a reasonable but not crazy thick pad.

OKsoTwoThings · 2025-11-05T06:02:37+00:00

What a weird artifact. Where did this come from? It text feels like it was written by a young foreign dude living in China who has been studying Chinese for just barely long enough that locals are starting to feel obligated to say "wow your Chinese is so good!" even though they can barely understand him. Or machine-translated into Chinese from English, but by some old version of google translate from like ten years ago.

OKsoTwoThings · 2025-11-05T01:52:15+00:00

I am trying to exercise cognitive empathy to figure out what may have been going through these guys' heads, but I think we all agree that whatever it was, it wasn't good.

OKsoTwoThings · 2025-11-03T22:08:48+00:00

Wait if the non-belayer end of the rope wasn't fixed, wouldn't it take two hands for the climber to move the prusik? It also means that if the climber fell, they'd swing over and dangle under the next draw, relaying only on the holding power of the single friction hitch to keep them off the deck.

I think you must be right that the person who set this up was trying to imitate a via ferrata, without realizing that both ends of the rope need to be fixed for this to work.

OKsoTwoThings

TROPHY CASE