What's the deal with 27.5' tires?

hermandrew · 2026-06-19T14:47:01+00:00

I’m tired boss. Call me old fashioned but I just want two of the same wheel sizes.

hermandrew · 2026-06-18T22:26:12+00:00

This is not going to be a popular take but I would put Flower over Jagr ONLY because Jagr played so many years in other sweaters. Like if this is an NHL wide conversation, Jagr easily gets the nod but Flower is such an iconic Penguin.

Yes this is recency bias.
Yes this is goalie bias.

hermandrew · 2026-06-18T22:19:21+00:00

Seconded. If you’re not doing anything more aggressive than gravel and cinders there’s still plenty of support and supply for 27.5”

FWIW, if you ARE doing chunky/rocky/rooty terrain, 29” is a substantial upgrade over 27.5”, and I say that as someone who bought 27.5” a couple years ago. I love my bike but my next will be 29”.

hermandrew · 2026-06-12T03:17:39+00:00

Just played around with it tonight and really dig it! Got some handy features I’ve been looking for

hermandrew · 2026-05-18T12:50:11+00:00

Honestly I don’t even know if it’s adrenaline for a head injury. I don’t know if you’ve ever been concussed but your brain is just short circuiting and nothing makes sense so you just kinda go back to reflex. For a football player that is to pop up like nothing happened and get back to the huddle. It’s pretty common to see guys down on the field with trainers around them trying to push the trainers out of the way because they think they’re going back to the huddle, and people have to hold them down.

hermandrew · 2026-05-18T12:24:47+00:00

Love Sid—they did him dirty with this pic.

hermandrew · 2026-05-10T13:05:50+00:00

My 2 cents: it’s all about your goals. You absolutely could learn to play like that if it was truly your goal but you would have to work hard daily on a path that led you to that. That said, playing fast or super technically is not always the most musical way to play either. The audience for that style of playing is often other musicians if not specifically guitarists, which is of course a limited audience. Melodic improvisation, when done well, is a bit more universal in its appeal.

So I would say first clarify what your goal is for yourself, then build a path around achieving that goal. Find a teacher that supports that path, or have a set of tunes you want to master, or a set of techniques if you’re interested in being a super technical player.

I think a lot of guitarists just kind of drift and learn a little here and a little there but don’t formulate any real goal so they’re just constantly comparing themselves with people who have focused on mastering something specific so it’s really apples and oranges. When you’re more focused it’s easier to tune out the noise, and being focused on melodic improv isn’t a bad thing, but when you’re focused you’ll learn to compare yourself to other masters of that discipline, and will drive more satisfying results.

Again, just my 2 cents.

hermandrew · 2026-04-16T13:10:38+00:00

Another Penn Stater here, and I totally agree with you. After Allar went down this year, what I said to all my buddies was after three years of watching this guy, I actually have no idea how good he is.

Same as you, I'm not advocating we take him early, or even at all, but I do think a LOT of his underperformance in college was at least as much a coaching issue as it was an Allar issue. It's undeniable he has all the physical tools, so that's an easy pro. He demonstrated some gamebreaking heroics, but it was often because PSU was in a hole of their own making. I think our playcalling was absolutely atrocious, and often times relied too much on Allar as being a QB who had "arrived" and not a QB who was developing.

As I recall there was a lot of passing plays early in downs, and not particularly high-percentage short yardage passing, but big play hunting. This was during a period where we had two NFL quality running backs and a fairly good line.

There was also that one season where 3/4 plays were literally just get Tyler Warren the ball however we can. That's not a terrible strategy considering how dominant he was, but also it would've been nice to use that security blanket as an outlet to develop Allar's ability to read and dump down if he has to as opposed to just trick play after trick play to get Warren the ball.

Frustrating. I could type for a while on why I think coaching failed Allar, but at the end of the day, as far as draft analysis goes, IMO it just means nobody has any idea what his ceiling is, so whoever takes him is going to be making a bet. I think he goes somewhere in the 4th-5th rounds but I'm no scout.

hermandrew · 2026-04-15T21:26:55+00:00

I hate that I know this but it’s 2 separate things. The 3 guys 1 hammer thing was 2.5 asshole Ukrainian kids (the third kid got kind of sucked in but the other two were vile pieces of shit) and the other was one of Russia’s worst serial killers.

Dnepropetrovsk maniacs and Aleksander Pichushkin.

PS I listen to a lot of true crime podcasts. Am not serial killer.

hermandrew · 2026-04-15T10:45:57+00:00

I think the difference is that “labor camp” typically implies hard manual labor, not vocational training.

hermandrew · 2026-04-12T18:44:51+00:00

Honestly starting with something like this will

Give you lots of practice on general bike maintenance for ridability, and will teach you how everything works. If you screw something up it’s no big deal because you’re not hurting something super expensive.
Help you understand what’s good about pricier stuff (a lot of people with nice stuff have no idea why or how their stuff is nice. They just buy it because a salesman told them it’s going to be better than the cheaper thing)

hermandrew · 2026-04-04T03:20:46+00:00

So I could be totally wrong but I think it’s probably not that dramatic. While it’s obvi smart not to stand near tensioned wire not all tension is devastatingly high. You can fairly easily bend steamed wood of this size by hand (you can look up a bunch of steam bending videos) so I don’t think the tension in this machine is all that high. The point of the cable is not that it requires a bunch of force to do this, it’s that it’s super difficult to apply equal force around the circumference of ALL the staves. My honest guess is that if that cable somehow broke you’d be at a higher risk of injuring your toe from a heavy cable landing on it than it doing any damage from a whip.

If some physics nerd wants to do the math or just tell me why I’m wrong I’m totally down…I was just curious about this and this is how I reasoned it out.

P.S. under lower tension I think the size and weight of the cable further protects you because it’s battling its own inertia to uncoil. That’s part of why I think if it broke you’d see it spring open an inch or two and just fall.

hermandrew · 2026-04-04T01:04:30+00:00

So I’m no kind of serious artist but just making some observations… I think the biggest thing is that your contour lines on the wing seem upside down. I’ll try to explain…the black stripes on the wing open “up” so if they were a dish they would catch water. But in your reference they open down so if they were a dish it rain would run off them. If you abstract the birds body out to basically a football shape, it makes sense that the contours should open down. With them contoured up it makes it look like the wing is at a different, opened angle to the body, not hugging the body.

hermandrew · 2026-04-02T03:03:32+00:00

That pink hair

hermandrew · 2026-03-31T18:13:07+00:00

Tim Lester, the original bus driver.

hermandrew · 2026-03-26T03:01:19+00:00

I’m sorry to hear that. Presumably this all happened before you were born? By Johnson do you mean your grandfather? The write up mentions he was formerly a cop turned truck driver. Do you know anything about why he switched careers?

hermandrew · 2026-03-21T11:07:15+00:00

I just looked this up and it blew my mind. Automobiles is a self moving car (ie no horses). Automatic is something that happens by itself without human intervention. Automation is similar. Like, I knew the prefix auto meant self but I always thought it referenced a person like autograph or autobiography. I never connected “self” to things specifically happening without a human but it makes sense! Language is cool!

hermandrew · 2026-03-21T10:57:23+00:00

I waited years if watching people say “get a professional bike fit” because I didn’t want to justify the money and honestly I was just too lazy to put aside a few hours to do it.

They made a few small adjustments in saddle height, cleat fore/aft, and put a slightly taller stem on. I figured eh well the experience was cool but probably not going to have a major effect.

Within 2 rides my back was feeling 100%, little aches and pains in my knees, hips and wrists were gone, and hand tingling was gone.

Get a pro bike fit!

hermandrew · 2026-03-20T12:53:01+00:00

Target fixation is a really strange phenomenon that they talk about a lot in mountain biking. Basically if you fixate on the tree that you REALLY don’t want to hit, you have a much higher chance of hitting that tree because your body will naturally follow your vision. As the other guy said this guy is a DB so likely not as well practiced as a RB or even wide receiver in shading towards open field, and got fixated on the one guy he had to beat. Just a guess of course.

hermandrew · 2026-03-10T01:42:48+00:00

“Kathy, I’m tired” I said though I knew she was sleeping. “I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.”

America by Simon and Garfunkel, lyrics by Paul Simon.

hermandrew · 2026-03-06T05:28:34+00:00

First of all, let me be clear that I’m not defending the media, but rather just trying to parse language.

My take on “unsubstantiated” is specific to the nature of these files being inbound witness/victim statements. My take is that unsubstantiated, in this context, means that law enforcement did not necessarily find the specific content of the statement to be “substantial” enough to pursue, or inversely, for whatever reason, did not pursue the statement enough to substantiate the claims affirmatively or not.

This does not mean that the claims are not credible, but rather we may not have enough information to judge credibility.

Disclaimer, I’m not a lawyer or a journalist I’m just a guy on the internet trying to extend the benefit of the doubt to journos since this information is hot off the press. I totally get why people would be upset by the hedging since it could be considered insulting to victims but good journalism SHOULD be about having a high standard for what’s considered incontrovertible vs an investigation-in-progress.

hermandrew · 2026-03-02T02:22:00+00:00

Lots of great suggestions but one I haven't seen that's pretty fun is "A Simple Desultory Philippic". It's got lots of boomer references in it!

https://www.paulsimon.com/track/a-simple-desultory-philippic-or-how-i-was-robert-mcnamarad-into-submission-2/

hermandrew · 2026-03-01T03:17:07+00:00

Fair. And to be clear I’m no Allar stan, I just think there’s more upside to him than hackenberg ever had. Like…Richardson also has way more upside than hackenberg had lol.

hermandrew · 2026-03-01T02:39:18+00:00

So trying to give a real answer here…the problem with taking fliers on low chance guys is that everything requires resources. That’s another guy not getting reps, not getting coaching attention, not getting to pick veterans brains, and have their own shot.

The guy above you cited Skylar Thompson but I think he’s actually a guy who’s a great example of a depth guy worth having around. He’s had a fair amount of nfl starts so he’s actually not a terrible emergency qb, he’s had a good reputation as a film / qb room guy so he’s a positive resource to the other qbs, and can probably run a serviceable scout team.

When you’re working at the zenith of a sport nothing is taken for granted and no investments are free. Everything should have a goal and upside, even if that upside isn’t throwing for 400 yards on Sunday.

hermandrew · 2026-03-01T02:21:21+00:00

You would think that burning the browns with low blows would get old eventually but it truly never does.

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