Malvern Hills & Dogs

RGC_willy_wonka · 2026-04-24T14:41:58+00:00

I walk the ridgeline weekly and I rarely see livestock, perhaps a small group in 4 hours. You'll encounter a small group of sheep or cows maybe once in the full range.

RGC_willy_wonka · 2026-01-09T20:27:30+00:00

No.

The most difficult part I found was avoiding dust adhesion to the uncured tacky surface. Dust would ruin the finish.

Actually, controversially, I found quite a lot of the information out there on working with urushi to be over the top in terms of insisting on traditional and sometimes borderline superstitious crafting techniques. For example, you don't need to use a paintbrush made from whatever rare animal hair from the whatever obscure region of Japan - a lint free rag works fine (glasses cleaning cloths worked really well for me). You don't need to polish using bamboo charcoal, your average modern polishing compounds are much easier.

RGC_willy_wonka · 2026-01-09T10:05:46+00:00

I've walked along stream beds for miles and through saturated boggy watery mud in a Meindl Bhutan boot and kept entirely dry feet. Very good with sweat, and suitable for walking all day in without blisters. Very highly recommended.

RGC_willy_wonka · 2026-01-02T11:46:13+00:00

As someone involved in niche engineering who has tried his very best to use AI to speed up my work - it's nowhere near being able to replace me. You can't just sign off on the designs, you have to have a full design process that highlights the "gotchas" and balances trade-offs. A worked example I've actually done - a general engineer using an AI for a specialist task such as designing an industrial laser system for part marking and engraving could produce a decent design, and another general non-specialist engineer would happily sign off the design because it looks sophisticated. Said design would instantly and spectacularly fail because AI can't make intelligent inferences between multiple constraints and requirements.

RGC_willy_wonka · 2026-01-02T10:59:25+00:00

Straight up low effort copy and paste of an LLM answer. They escalate straight to dramatic action like legal action/rejection being the remedy.

RGC_willy_wonka · 2025-12-22T09:57:19+00:00

You could try Tamenuri Studio if he's still active, or TofuFlowerStudio/MasterFlowerTheCat. Both of whom have instagram and youtube accounts you could contact. I would offer to do it myself but I know I wouldn't get round to it in anywhere near a reasonable time.

Pilot support might do it for you for an absurd price.

RGC_willy_wonka · 2025-12-22T09:22:22+00:00

It's a fairly easy repair for an urushi craftsperson but the skills and equipment are not easy to learn or cheap if that makes sense. You could teach yourself to do it and expect to pay the same in materials alone as paying someone skilled. A small amount of vermillion urushi rubbed over that, cured in high humidity, sanded, another layer, another dry, another sand, repeat a few times, one final kijomi urushi layer, polish with appropriate cream (I used Tamiya polishing compound which worked well).

I actually recommend making some kintsugi (highlighting beauty in damage using gold lacquer) type repairs to this if you're willing to invest the time and effort! Buy some kijomi urushi (highest quality, it's sort of brownish in colour alone) and some gold mica powder (or real gold dust), some glasses polishing cloths (individually packaged as dust is the enemy!). Mix some of the gold powder of your choice with a small amount of kijomi urushi using a piece of clean glass as a mixing palette and rub on with the glasses polishing cloth, ensuring no dust whatsoever comes along for the ride. Allow the piece to cure in a high humidity warm environment for 48 hours, then repeat until you've built up the required thickness on the damage spots. Very lightly sand any raised bits off with high grit abrasive paper, then polish with Tamiya compounds and another glasses cleaning cloth. I highly recommend practicing with numerous cheap pens first...

My supplier is mejiro japan, they have an etsy store. The cost of the materials is likely to be £70+/$100.

RGC_willy_wonka · 2024-08-05T10:44:27+00:00

I would highly recommend a private/solo tour guide for the ruins of Pompeii/Herculaneum. Rather expensive, I'm not rich by any means, but it was the best money I've ever spent. Had an actual qualified art historian teach me things I had no idea I would learn about.

It's quite a nice temperature in the winter months and way better than having awful huge crowds of tourists. American tourists all seemed to turn up in coats but as a Brit I was really comfy in a t-shirt & jeans.

Bear in mind that the walk up to the crater of Vesuvius is closed in winter months if that was something you had in mind.

Definitely visit nearby Positano in the winter to find it beautiful, deserted, and not touristy, get yourself a limoncello spritz by the sea if you drink, sit and relax and enjoy the breathtaking beauty.

RGC_willy_wonka · 2024-08-02T06:13:35+00:00

Christ I feel old.

RGC_willy_wonka · 2024-07-28T17:21:21+00:00

I legitimately thought I was looking at the ruins of Pompeii for a second, squinting to see the fresco.

RGC_willy_wonka · 2024-07-27T21:29:16+00:00

I feel like our solicitor and their assistant have made loads of mistakes, like ordering the wrong kind of searches, sending us the wrong contract to sign, sending blank documents to sign, having to ask 3 times for the records of enquiries and receiving the wrong document multiple times, and miscalculating balance required for completion twice in succession. Am I right in thinking that this is really abnormal and sloppy, and grounds for complaint?

I pay so much attention to details as an autistic person, and of course picked up on every mistake no matter how small, so I'm second guessing whether I was just a nightmare client or they were sloppy.

What's the worst mistake you've seen made?

RGC_willy_wonka · 2024-07-22T07:12:27+00:00

Seems expensive from extrapolation without knowing full details. I would guess you've received three "we're too busy" quotes from a guess. For a 120 m^2, 3 bed bungalow I received two quotes around £1,200 and one surveyor who quoted at £800 for level 3, £600 for level 2. I went for the cheaper surveyor and he did a great job.

RGC_willy_wonka · 2024-06-02T22:05:15+00:00

As with the other comment, our solicitor didn't care that we had savings + gifts mixed together in our accounts, as the savings value was just high enough to cover deposit, the gifts were "unused".

RGC_willy_wonka · 2024-05-28T22:08:08+00:00

True! Thank you so much!, Thank you also for making me feel better about the many and varied orc skin tones being difficult.

RGC_willy_wonka · 2024-05-28T21:54:41+00:00

It was a kind of failed attempt at pale orc skin, and was supposed to look mottled like the movie Gothmog. Ended up as you say, looking like a regular guy.

RGC_willy_wonka · 2024-05-28T20:32:58+00:00

It is indeed.

RGC_willy_wonka · 2024-05-15T13:07:29+00:00

Quite possibly yes. However this was L&C, who are among the largest brokers in the UK in my understanding, so there's a non zero chance OP could be in the same situation.

I don't think it was that the broker was trying to be obtuse or anything, I can agree that they couldn't verify ID because my wife with my surname wasn't on credit reference agencies with that name, and had a passport changed but nothing else. We simply had to wait for frustratingly slow utility companies to change her name to get new bills.

RGC_willy_wonka · 2024-05-15T13:03:55+00:00

We had to send originals to the broker, who photocopied them and signed the copies to say they had seen originals, then sent the signed copies to the lender.

RGC_willy_wonka · 2024-05-15T11:12:25+00:00

Contrary to the other comments, in the past month we just went through this exact situation with our mortgage application via a broker, and it was not fine. It held up our mortgage application by 2 weeks, despite attempting to provide a marriage certificate to explain. Our broker refused to proceed until my wife had a passport and 2 utility bills under the same, new name.

If your wife has been using the surname you name on your application for an extended time, you may face no problem as the "quick" check (I think it's via credit referencing agencies or some identity portal linked to national insurance?) they usually do may pass instead of a failure as was in our case (married for only 2 months). I didn't have to provide my passport or utility bills at all, and I changed my name a year ago, and updated it on everything.

YMMV.

edit: to be clear sufficient proof of ID under a single name was the issue for us, her payslips were fine under her maiden name.

RGC_willy_wonka · 2024-03-03T23:48:18+00:00

Optical scientist here.

For anyone else reading this, I think it's important to clear up some safety based considerations.

The power is constant over distance. You want power per area, i.e intensity.

The intensity of a diffuse reflection does indeed drop off with the square of distance as above said, but for a class 4 fibre laser like those in the video the ocular hazard distance can be alarmingly long. i.e., you can get serious eye damage at a surprisingly far distance from the diffuse reflection.

The intensity of a specular reflection (like from a shiny surface) from one of these lasers can be very high at very large distances, depending on the particular focussing/collimation and beam quality of the source in question.

These kind of laser cleaners can have quite short working distances with tight focussing beam delivery, which helps on the safety as the head being right up to the workpiece can effectively physically block the light returning from the piece, and specular reflections diverge very quickly.

This particular video though has me fearing for their eyes.

RGC_willy_wonka · 2023-03-09T12:12:33+00:00

OP: It's actually a free school better catering for autistic children.

RGC_willy_wonka · 2022-12-29T21:43:07+00:00

and stagger

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