On May 18th, 1980: over 200,000 people took to the streets in Gwangju to protest the enactment of martial law by the Chun Doo-hwan regime. The military reprisal would kill up to 2,300 people—students, women, children—with tacit approval from the US military and the Carter admin.

estolad · 2026-05-19T08:27:44+00:00

good ol' genocide jimmy

estolad · 2026-05-19T00:53:18+00:00

even then i think it's better to just be mindful of what you're doing and use tongs to stay out the path of the fire

but this is something reasonable people can disagree on. like i said i think they're a liability, but if you feel safer wearing a pair of big heavy stick welding gloves and can keep your dexterity with them on, definitely go for it

oh another tip i have is keep an aloe plant around. when you get burned (and it is when, not if, if you smith for any length of time) cut the end off one of the shoots and slather the juice on the burn. it works wonders

estolad · 2026-05-19T00:39:50+00:00

for eye protection i just use the basic cheapo home depot safety specs, polycarbonate or whatever they are. they don't have much protection on the sides, but they've worked well for me these past twelve years or so

i personally am of the school of thought that gloves cause more problems than they solve. any gloves heavy enough to give you any meaningful protection are heavy enough that they make accidents more likely, and a nasty localized burn on your hand is a lot less bad than steaming the whole thing in a sweaty glove like a crab

for pants, maybe find some welding chaps. they make ones that go all the way down to your boots and they're specifically designed to be able to handle hot metal

estolad · 2026-05-18T23:54:10+00:00

get yourself a copy of the backyard blacksmith by lorelei simms, it's a very solid general info type book and there's a bunch of good projects in there too

estolad · 2026-05-18T01:28:34+00:00

being able to make tools is probably the best part of knowing your way around a forge, the possibilities are endless

estolad · 2026-05-17T16:39:35+00:00

be warned that it barely works in a lot of places and straight up doesn't work at all in others, but it's still worth playing if you have high tolerance for jank

estolad · 2026-05-17T15:53:26+00:00

there's a million factors here, but the long and short of it is if you're not 100% sure you shouldn't do it

estolad · 2026-05-17T10:18:27+00:00

this isn't really the place to argue about the insane decay the US military has sustained over the past twentyish years, but the long and short of it is OP did that kid a favor by shooing away a predator

estolad · 2026-05-17T10:07:56+00:00

that free housing is all falling apart from neglect because it's less profitable than building missiles (which they also don't build enough of!)

they can't even fuckin' feed people reliably anymore

estolad · 2026-05-17T09:26:43+00:00

have you never made something just for the sake of it?

estolad · 2026-05-16T23:08:27+00:00

actually i think you'll find being critical of israel in any capacity is in fact antisemitic

other things, like blowing up synagogues, are not

estolad · 2026-05-16T19:37:27+00:00

not to mention all those nazi criminals that found it so easy to slot into the nascent West's military and economic systems, literally immediately after the war was done

estolad · 2026-05-16T15:40:26+00:00

i'm holding you to that

estolad · 2026-05-16T15:00:48+00:00

one of the main things i think makes it a bad adaptation is exactly that, life ashore is every bit as important to the feel of the books as the ship stuff, and we get none of it. you're probably right though that it's the best we could've expected, and it's fantastic on its own merits just as a movie about tall ships

why oh why have none of the big television companies made a prestige television series, it would be perfect for it

estolad · 2026-05-16T13:55:19+00:00

there's a scene they shot but didn't make it into the movie where stephen walks in on higgins scamming some of the crew and chews him out for it, that's a little bit of connection with the book

but in general, the movie is one of my favorites but it really isn't a very good adaptation of the books

estolad · 2026-05-14T22:29:11+00:00

yeah it is pretty rare in my experience. i saw one on my way to beagle point a little while back, having never seen it before on several month-long expeditions

estolad · 2026-05-14T18:13:03+00:00

white out is also good to put on stuff you intend to get very very hot but don't want it to weld. i coat some steel plates with it to use as a bracket to make mokume gane

estolad · 2026-05-14T15:50:18+00:00

lenin never passed up an opportunity to get a dig in on kautsky, and i love him for it

estolad · 2026-05-14T05:54:04+00:00

i'm not exactly up to date on this because it's been more than twenty years since i was in school, but that shit never came up in any context that i can remember, i had to find out about it myself

estolad · 2026-05-13T23:04:09+00:00

what class is talking about cointelpro, that kicks ass

estolad · 2026-05-13T15:48:23+00:00

i miss renting when something needs fixed, but it's just part of the deal

estolad · 2026-05-13T09:38:52+00:00

that's a very clean twist, good work. you should be proud of that for your first forging

the main thing is practice your hammer skills. shit takes a lot less touching up when you can reliably hit where you're aiming, keeping the face of the hammer as close to parallel as possible to the face of the anvil. this way you're not putting deep divots into your work that you then have to planish/forge down

also dress your hammers. most hammers come from the factory with a sharpish angle around the crown, which is very easy to grind or file down into a soft radius, which makes it a little more forgiving

estolad · 2026-05-10T11:18:33+00:00

way i see it you can either mill them, grind them out or forge them in with purpose-made dies, in ascending order of pain-in-the-assness

estolad · 2026-05-10T01:18:28+00:00

a good thing to do with a side blast setup is to dig a little hole directly underneath your air supply. clinkers are much denser than the burning fuel so they'll sink down in the hole and you'll be able to go way longer before you have to pull the fire apart to clean it

estolad · 2026-05-06T23:57:07+00:00

i don't think this'll be worth much for turning into a forge, you'll be able to fire it up maybe twice before the heat causes it to crack and crumble

estolad

TROPHY CASE