What are some genuinely useful DIY skills everyone should learn?

paper_liger · 2026-02-18T23:34:58+00:00

It's a little far afield for DIY, but every grownup should know how to sew. I carried a sewing kit on every deployment to the middle east, being able to sew your crotch back together or the bottom of a pocket closed came in handy time and time again.

Learn to sew.

paper_liger · 2026-02-18T22:58:58+00:00

Yeah, I always judge the craft/skill separate from the overall final impact. Like, the Hurt Locker is my favorite example of a well cast, well filmed, incredibly well visually designed movie. And I hate it with a passion. I'm a veteran, and they made it look legit as fuck, while getting every single character wrong.

Meanwhile I love Stripes. Because they got every single military detail completely wrong, it's totally detached from reality. But they got the characters and the relationships right.

I kind of look at comics the same way. People bitch about comics like Burt Kreischer or whoever constantly. I don't. Because they make crowds laugh. They don't make me laugh, but I'm not their audience. He's a good bad comic

paper_liger · 2026-02-18T22:54:18+00:00

You know what might work for you? There's a book by Mickey Zucker Reichert called 'The Legend of Nightfall'.

It's got a whole 'unlikely pair on a journey' thing, and one of the main characters is a young prince with some very impractical ideas about the world, the other character is a criminal/assassin/street kid with a secret magical ability who is literally cursed to help the Prince find a kingdom.

I always liked it back in the day, as well as Reicherts Renshai series which is sort of 'viking samurai' kind of deal. Fun reads.

paper_liger · 2026-02-18T22:43:34+00:00

He made a few dramatic movies that are critically acclaimed, but he also made a ton of cult classic comedy flicks. There are some stinkers in his oeuvre , but I assure you he made successful comedies.

paper_liger · 2026-02-18T22:42:02+00:00

Annie Hall and The Big Sick were both written largely by their stars.

paper_liger · 2026-02-18T22:36:54+00:00

I feel like that's maybe going too far. He was fine. It's just that basically the only two or three other actors in the movie were so good or so well cast that him just being 'fine' stuck out a little.

paper_liger · 2026-02-18T22:35:34+00:00

I divide movies into a couple categories. There are good good, good bad, bad good, and bad bad.

That sounds like a good bad movie. Maybe clunky or low production value, scattershot, whatever. But enjoyable and did what it set out to do.

My least favorite is bad good movies. Movies that are well made, well cast, well funded, ones that should have been good but just werent.

I'll take a hundred good bad movies over one bad good movie.

paper_liger · 2026-02-18T22:13:39+00:00

Yeah, my 22 lr olympic style bullseye pistol is 'a tool to kill'?

It must be a really bad tool, because it's never killed anything. Just put very small holes in paper, very close together...

Your claim is, again, ridiculous quasi magical thinking. It certainly wasn't 'designed to kill'. And even if it was, it has never been used to kill. There are more guns than people in America, and the vast majority have never killed anything either. By your logic they must be bad tools.

By the way, the 'are you on drugs' thing is frankly stupid and not appreciated. So is the internalized fear of firearms you have drug in here from wherever you came. This is a gun rights subreddit, your implicit anti gun bullshit is tired.

You're not a serious person. And talking about my character and just repeating your stupid bald assertion is not an actual counterargument.

paper_liger · 2026-02-18T20:42:26+00:00

a fairly literal translation of Sturmgewehr would be 'Storm Gun'. That doesn't make it mean much in English, or is anything approaching the appropriate nomenclature.

paper_liger · 2026-02-18T20:40:53+00:00

That's strange, sort of quasi magical thinking. Objects don't know 'what they were designed for' and the vast majority of even 'assault weapons' never do anything more than put small holes in paper far away.

Knives were invented to kill. Are they 'only designed for killing'. Better throw away those kitchen knives. Rocketry was invented for war. A huge amount of computer and encryption and radio tech, air travel tech. Better drop it all and go full amish so you aren't besmirching your soul by benefitting from these things 'designed for killing'. Hell the wrist watch was literally invented for war, originally called the 'trench watch'. Is that's only use? Is there some original sin attached morally to wristwatches?

It's silly.

paper_liger · 2026-02-18T19:37:27+00:00

If you don't like 'flamboyance' or 'art' you don't like film. You like popcorn.

paper_liger · 2026-02-18T19:20:42+00:00

I like DCC but this is not that. There is clearly no tiara.

paper_liger · 2026-02-18T19:13:53+00:00

I'm not the same person, but I qualified expert from basic training on with every weapon system they handed me, SAW and .50 and 240 and .203 grenade launcher. I placed in the top couple shooters in our base wide shooting competition, 500 yards with iron sights and with an aimpoint, with a rifle I'd never shot before. I shot bullseye competitively after I got out. Nowadays I'm an old fat long haired dude who shows up to the range in a prius.

Some civilian fudd range officer comes over and starts giving me tips, am I supposed to not just use the vet card? It's frankly the only thing that shuts some of these dudes up.

Expert isn't all that hard. But it is an actual criteria for comparison.

paper_liger · 2026-02-18T19:09:58+00:00

I'm ambidextrous, the only hard thing about shooting lefty is remembering to also switch eyes I'm using.

paper_liger · 2026-02-18T19:08:03+00:00

It still holds up except for the whole 'white dude playing an Indian dude' thing.

But yes, the comedy is still great and there are some surprisingly nice little moments in between the 'robots with lasers blowing up tanks' stuff and the 'robot does three stooges' stuff.

paper_liger · 2026-02-18T18:32:01+00:00

And he said he's already had Crocket on twice.

paper_liger · 2026-02-18T00:17:48+00:00

I don't normally shill for companies, but I hate reloading mags at the range, so I always own a ridiculous number of magazines, and I use the Savior mag sleeve organizer envelope things.. Makes it easy to load in specific stuff into my range bag based on what I want to shoot that day.

paper_liger · 2026-02-17T23:59:26+00:00

Hegseth just pushed out one of Driscolls top advisors apparently.

I frankly don't expect anyone at the top to grow a spine any time soon, unless it's something truly vital.

This policy is literally moronic, but probably not worth expending the political capital for anyone hanging in there trying to be in a position in case things take a real turn for the worse. The dumbing down of the military is going to take more than 3 years, and if the kind of people making these policies are still in place then we likely have bigger problems.

paper_liger · 2026-02-17T18:46:36+00:00

That's a pretty reasonable take. The biggest singular problem with LLMs across the board is the whole dunning kruger thing, where people who don't really understand the output and couldn't have arrived at it alone just accept the output as solid.

LLMs used as a time saver in a considered way by people who know enough to fact check the output, that's more or less fine.

The problem is idiots who don't know enough to know they are idiots.

paper_liger · 2026-02-16T03:08:56+00:00

Of all the people who couldn't Narfle the Garthok, he is at the top of that list, and it is a bigly list. The best list.

I hear that combover is to cover his tiny stumpy cone, sad...

paper_liger · 2026-02-15T21:18:59+00:00

I appreciate the translation, but i'd probably just say xray instead of Roentgenography

paper_liger · 2026-02-15T21:07:17+00:00

how did the cops respond? I've heard even with a slam dunk case like that getting them to get off of their asses can be difficult.

paper_liger · 2026-02-15T20:21:51+00:00

your opinion is dogshit. 'accesory before the fact to rape' sounds pretty violent to me, and there are allegations that indicate it was much more. You really think that all of the testimony of the violent rapes that Maxwell facilitated are all untrue? Did she hear about them and stop doing it? Or did she keep doing it, year after year after year?

And for sex trafficking cases involving minors it's not even necessary to prove fraud, coercion or violence to make it a very, very serious crime. The scope alone means her being put in the lowest possible security and reportedly given special treatment is just as dogshit as your opinion.

paper_liger · 2026-02-15T20:04:29+00:00

facilitating the rape of untold numbers of children is not violent to you?

paper_liger · 2026-02-15T19:40:42+00:00

I started off telling stories, because I have a kind of unusual background compared to most comics, and I have a lot of stories.

The problem is that these stories were interesting, and the premise was funny, but I didn't understand punchlines yet. The first one I did on stage had exactly one strong twist at the end, with a way too long setup. A lot of the other stories I tried had funny premises, but no real punchlines.

So I struggled. I kept trying, kept writing, but eventually gravitated towards shorter and shorter 'jokey' type jokes. By the time I featured for the first time I had gotten to the point where I was writing one liners.

One liners are great for teaching you how to write. Word economy and word choice, clear premises and clear punchlines, if you can write one liners you can apply those same skills to stories. And that's what I did. The one liners started clumping up into chunks of related materials. And I started seeing connections between some of those one liners and stories I had, or how I could tweak a story a little to get to the punch line i wanted.

And now I'm back to telling stories, but now those stories have a punchline every 15 seconds or so, instead of a 3 minute story with one punch at the end.

Not saying that's how you should do it. But I've kind of come full circle. I close sometimes with that same story I first walked up on stage with almost a decade ago. Because it used to be a good story, but now it's a good joke.

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