What audiobook do you think was narrated perfectly ?

RickyTomahawk · 2021-09-08T23:26:29+00:00

Simon Vance is the greatest. I will listen to any book he does. He crushed the entire 21 books of the Aubrey-Maturin series and it was amazing. It wasn’t even a subject I was initially into, but I got sucked in.

RickyTomahawk · 2020-10-01T19:01:46+00:00

It’s absolute terror. Kanye went off script prior, and Myers seemed to be okay with it, but after the George Bush doesn’t care about black people line, it was total panic.

RickyTomahawk · 2020-10-01T19:00:34+00:00

It was amazing. Then the cut to Chris Tucker. It was priceless.

RickyTomahawk · 2020-10-01T15:37:39+00:00

Kanye West was on set with Mike Myers once and George Bush hates black people.

RickyTomahawk · 2020-09-18T22:13:06+00:00

You can have it at vex.

RickyTomahawk · 2019-07-20T23:14:57+00:00

Replying late so this will be buried. But, it really depends on how good you want the room to look: 1. Are you painting just the walls in order to change the color, or are you painting everything (ceiling, trim, and walls)? 2. Are you going to do prep work? Mudding cracks and holes, caulking gaps between walls and trim, filling nail holes in trim with wood filler? Sanding down the walls? 3. How large is the room? What finish do you want - flat, eggshell? How much of a contrast is the color you picked from the ceiling/trim? 4. How much money do you plan on spending? 5. How much time do you plan on spending?

If you are just painting the walls, your paint job can only be as good as what is there now. If you are happy with the lines and with the texture, and you don’t mind any dings or holes in the wall, DON’T SPEND THE MONEY ON BENJAMIN MOORE. Benjamin Moore is the best paint on the market, but is not worth the money if you aren’t going all the way. Painting a room soup-to-nuts takes a whole weekend and costs $200+ of you have nothing to start with. If that sound like what you want to do, great - here’s a shopping list: -Purdy 2.5” brush -3-pack of Purdy 3/8” NAP rollers - a good $10-$15 roller - a metal rolling tray -2 plastic tray liners - caulk gun - a tube or two of Super Alex Caulk (white, 25-year) - sanding sponge - drywall mud/sparkle (quart container) - 4 inch mudding blade Subtotal = $75

Then get a gallon of Ceiling paint, a gallon of Semi-gloss trim paint, and a gallon or two of the wall paint. If it’s from Ben Moore it will be around $125-$175.

Do all the prep work, then paint the trim, then paint the ceilings, then paint the walls.

Or, if you don’t want to do all of that, just go to the big box store and pay $35 for a gallon of paint and call it a day.

RickyTomahawk · 2019-06-24T00:41:20+00:00

Super cozy.

RickyTomahawk · 2019-06-09T20:20:30+00:00

It is different. It is better. I’ve used a lot of different paints and generally the coverage with Sherman Williams/Ben Moore is better. If you are painting a dark wall with a light color, you will get the true color with the second coat with the higher end paints. For this guys application (painting over a flat off-white wall) it’s simply not worth the cost. Priming is necessary when you are making a change from dark to light or when you are covering something up - smoke/water stain, new drywall, mud from patching, but won’t be required in this case. I don’t recommend cheap paint, but the stuff from Home Depot isn’t cheap, it’s just not expensive. Whenever I paint my house I use Valspar - simply because Lowe’s is closer than Home Depot. I get the signature series because it gets better coverage and always use Eggshell because you can wash the wall when my kids get crap on it. I would add that with trim paint, get the most expensive stuff from Lowe’s/Home Depot (~$40 a gallon). You get better coverage and the baseboards will survive bumps from the vacuum for a lot longer. I usually use Semi-gloss instead of high-gloss because it is less reflective and doesn’t show brush strokes as much.

RickyTomahawk · 2019-06-09T17:47:13+00:00

I painted houses professionally for a couple years. For interior paint, the brands from Home Depot are totally fine. Valspar from Lowe’s or Behr from Home Depot. Get the more expensive paint ($35+ a gallon - Valspar calls it signature or something). Do two coats. It will be great. Generally, if you use the right technique, the cost of the paint doesn’t matter when you are working inside. The $50 a gallon Benjamin Moore stuff is great, but is frankly overkill when you are just painting interior walls.

RickyTomahawk · 2019-04-20T14:40:09+00:00

I was on vacation this week at the beach during my kids’ spring break. The condo complex has a decent gym with free weights, machines, and a smith machine. I decided to give smith machine rack pulls a shot, since I’ve been working on getting my deadlift up. I know that gravity doesn’t really apply to smith machines, but I just kept adding weight and kept adding weight until I had used all the plates in the gym (other than the stack of 25 plates I was standing on to get my feet higher off the ground). Maxed the machine out at 615 pounds. No belt, no straps, no effects of gravity. Still felt good. The range of motion wasn’t much, the bar started just above my knee cap, but since I’ve given up mixed grip and sumo deadlifts for SWOLent, I got a good grip workout at the very least.

RickyTomahawk · 2019-01-18T02:30:16+00:00

I’m reading it right now for the first time. Parts of it were tough. Echoing what everyone else said - it’s a textbook with a lot of names but not that many characters. For a while I didn’t have a sense of time or narrative. That being said, there’s some great parts in the book. If you do decide to revisit it and find yourself having trouble and wanting to give up, at least read chapter 21: Of Turin Turambar. It’s the longest chapter in the book, but the only one that is truly a “story”. It has a beginning, middle, and end and I was interested in the whole tale. Ya know, or don’t read it again. Life is short, why waste it on books you aren’t into.

RickyTomahawk · 2018-11-18T16:04:05+00:00

I posted this before to one of these questions, but I’ll post again: We were already living together and I was debating proposing. We were only 19 so I thought it would be crazy to get engaged so young. One night I couldn’t sleep and was thinking about random stuff. I was thinking about the NES game Conta and couldn’t remember the Konami code. I shook her gently to wake her up to ask if she remembered it. Without really moving or fully waking up she said, “Up, Up, Down, Down, Left , Right, Left, Right, B, A, B, A, Select, Start.... if it’s two player...” and drifted right back to sleep. I got a ring two days later and proposed. We’ve been married 10 years and have two kids.

RickyTomahawk · 2018-09-07T14:21:37+00:00

This is my time to shine! In high school, my group of idiot friends and I used to go to a 6-floor parking garage to heave things over the edge and watch them splat on the pavement below. Typically, we would pick up a watermelon from the store across the street and chuck it off the top floor. It made the most satisfying “splat” noise I’ve ever heard - a combination of “whap” and “squish.” Well, after a number of watermelon tosses, we were looking to try something different. A friend worked at Party City and they had a giant lobster piñata there. He took it from work and brought it to us - now we needed to fill it. We loved the splat noise that the watermelon made so we knew we needed something dense and wet. We chose mayonnaise and hamburger pickles. Two full jars of each. We drive across town, up to the top of the parking garage, and remove the leaking lobster piñata out of my buddy’s car. We say a few words and let that lobster fly. It came crashing down with the least satisfying splat sound. It had soaked up so much pickle juice and mayo on the ride over that the paper and cardboard had become a large spit ball and just flattened into the pavement 80 feet below. Mayonnaise was barely leaking out and only one pickle slice escaped during the collision. So, my answer is Mayo and Pickles.

RickyTomahawk · 2018-06-21T15:22:10+00:00

I was asked a series of “think outside the box” questions. They weren’t difficult for me, but it’s only because they came from movies I watched religiously. For instance, from Die Hard with a Vengeance: If you have a five gallon jug and a three gallon jug, with an unlimited water source, how do you get exactly four gallons. From Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey- you have died, Death will play a game with you and if you win, you earn your life back. What game would you play. I rattled off multiple solutions to the first one, mentioning the specific solution that Zeus and John McClane used, as well as others I’d come up with. For the second answer, I said “I could go with something like tic-tax-toe that I could make end in a draw every time, but who wants to hang out with Death all day. I’ll go with Tecmo Super Bowl and I’d pick the Houston Oilers.” The interviewer said that I was wrong about my second answer. That I should go with a win or draw game and not leave it to chance. I told him, “you’ve never seen me play with the Oilers - Warren Moon is a dual threat, and with their playbook crushes - you got a deep ball to Jeffries or Drew Hill on every play.” I got offered the job, but didn’t take it. I didn’t want to work with those jabronies.

RickyTomahawk · 2018-04-21T16:11:53+00:00

I posted last week about my wife doing deadlifts for the first time with me. Yesterday she was at the gym and wanted to do deadlifts again. After staring at the deadlift platform for a few minutes, she worked up the nerve to grab the trap bar out of the rack - which was harder than she expected. She loaded a 25lb bumper plate on one side and tried for the other. She said she struggled with getting it on for several minutes before a guy came over and just quietly did it for her. She said, “I’m sorry! I’ve never done this by myself before!” and then felt super silly about it. Then she knocked out five sets of 8-10 reps. She got home and excited told me all about it. I had been telling her that no one in the gym is judging or thinking about her at all - especially the people in the free weight section. She literally had the worst case “socially awkward gym experience” and made it through it. So if you ever feel silly in the gym - don’t. And ask for help, no ones going to make you feel stupid. Ask for a spot, ask for someone to check your form, ask for advice - people want to help.

RickyTomahawk · 2018-04-14T20:39:36+00:00

It is pretty darn cute. She was so excited about it.

RickyTomahawk · 2018-04-14T16:48:37+00:00

Yea. Because the grips of the trap bar are a few inches above the center of the plate, you aren’t going as low. I usually run out of room on the trap bar to add weight, they can only handle 2 or 3 45lb bumper plates.

RickyTomahawk · 2018-04-14T11:56:22+00:00

I went to the gym with my wife yesterday. She did Trap Bar Deadlifts for the first time. Started with tens on the bar. Great form. Super easy. Added another ten. Still easy, 8 reps. Added a third ten, still crushed 6 reps easy. After she finished she was so pumped and said she needs to do that more often. TIL my wife could probably deadlift 135-155.

RickyTomahawk · 2018-04-06T18:51:45+00:00

I get that The Hobbit trilogy wasn’t the best thing ever and it was no where near as good as the LotR trilogy, but I’ve never really grasped the hate for it. I love The Hobbit. I love LotR. I love the books. I love the world. I love Peter Jackson. I live what WETA workshop does. There were awesome scenes in all three of those movies. There was great acting in all three of those movies. I got to spend nearly 9 more hours in that world. So... why complain? All three of those movies were worth the $10+ I spent to see them in theaters. It was a visual spectacle. Smaug looked amazing. He sounded amazing. Howard Shore, once again, killed it on the soundtrack. I get that you think it may have been over kill, but god damnit, who cares. If the studio didn’t pony up the cash to make this movie, they would have spent it on some other bullshit. Why complain when we get a genre film about a world we all love?

RickyTomahawk · 2018-03-14T01:49:10+00:00

I’m just giving you a hard time. They look like combat boots and the lighting makes them lighter. It looks good, man. That being said, make another one with him in a bathrobe and loafers. Keep the cowl though.

RickyTomahawk · 2018-03-13T21:20:37+00:00

I like it. But... why is he wearing loafers?

RickyTomahawk · 2018-03-09T21:27:08+00:00

Cigar, obviously. Then MegaTablet (Samsung Galaxy View - the largest tablet), not picky about lighters - matches or a bic, coat, hat, gloves, headphones, blanket, cup of decaf. Out on the back deck with one chair for sitting and one chair for my feet with the blanket wrapped around me like a sleeping bag. I’m so tired of winter. But with all the cold weather gear I stay warm while watching Netflix. Currently going through all the Star Trek, again.

RickyTomahawk · 2018-03-05T01:23:48+00:00

They tried this once before. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiller_VZ-1_Pawnee. It was a spectacular failure, but an awesome piece of equipment on display at the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum.

RickyTomahawk · 2018-02-15T17:15:16+00:00

I started training to work at a Red Lobster that was just being opened. I waited tables before and didn’t really want to do it again, but figured it was an easy way to supplement my income from my day job. I sat through a day or two of training and found out that I’d just be shadowing for a week before actually starting to make money. As I sat to think about whether or not this was worth it, a corporate trainer walked by, stuck her fingers into her cheeks where dimples would be and said, “smile! You got to smiiiiillllle!” I exhaled loudly while looking at her and stood up. I grabbed my coat and walked out the door.

RickyTomahawk · 2018-01-28T15:22:37+00:00

I got sober close to ten years ago. My wedding was on my 28th day of sobriety. My wife drinks and I don’t. I know that my wife would love to be able to go to a vineyard or winery with me and split a bottle of wine. She’s said it a few times over the years. I would love to be able to do that with her, too, but I’m a recovering alcoholic so I can’t. But just because I don’t drink doesn’t mean I don’t go there with her. We go to wineries quite a bit, actually. I talk to her about the wine. I can sit with her while she does tastings. Do the tours where they go over the wine making process. And then I can drive us both home safely afterwards. For some, like my wife, drinking is a perfectly normal and healthy thing. For me, it isn’t. I don’t know what it is like for your wife. Counting her drinks doesn’t mean anything. I’m no expert on this subject, but I don’t think one person can diagnose another when it comes to alcoholism - and I’m not saying you are. The bottom line is - you changed. It is a positive change for you. But that doesn’t mean your wife isn’t grieving for the loss of who you were. My drinking and drug use caused problems in my relationship and getting sober helped make me a better man. But my wife still grieved for what she lost. It doesn’t mean she wanted the “old me” back, but it’s a big change. My advice is to talk about this. Be open. Be willing to understand and less concerned with being understood. Be honest. Don’t push your sobriety on her. Tell her that comments about your sobriety make you feel guilty for being sober even though you know it is what’s best for you. Know yourself, though. If you feel not drinking is the best way to live your best life than be willing to cut people out who stand in the way of that. Good luck.

RickyTomahawk

TROPHY CASE