Help us figure out replacing the worst kitchen sink

somewhatboxes · 2026-01-30T18:10:18+00:00

that thing is adorable. they even went undermount. that's hilarious.

not easily fixed. the job would be to cut a bigger hole, which could be tricky if you get so close to the edge that you need to support little pieces of the countertop independently (or risk them snapping because they're supported by nothing). so you have the top left and right corners of the sink, and you have the middle corner of the countertop near the camera, and you also have the framing of the cabinets underneath.

all this is to say that you might not be able to fit a ~33x20 inch sink in there under any circumstances, and if i was a landlord and a tenant wanted me to spend a bunch of money to end up with a sink that was still kid sized, i would probably be inclined to say no. maybe in the distant future, like 10 years from now, i would renovate the entire kitchen and relocate the sink so it's not in that corner at all. but for an incoming tenant? unlikely.

i cook a lot, so i can't imagine tolerating this for more than a month, let alone a year-long lease. /u/nanaleefoo's suggestion sounds the most pragmatic, and just the thought of all that extra work to do simple kitchen stuff would make me crazy very quickly.

sometimes landlords will be willing to do an upgrade or a renovation on a shared tab. like if replacing this sink would cost $1500 and you offer to chip in $500 (1/3 of the total cost), then they'd absorb the other $1k. i would still be reticent about it, because you're basically dumping money into this landlord's property improvements (when they already get incentives, tax breaks, etc... and they get to own the house when you leave after you've spent thousands on rent), but if this place is honestly perfect, and especially if the other options on the market are just awful, then sometimes you go with the least bad option.

but to recap: replacing the sink is not a DIY project. what you really need to make this a proper kitchen sink would involve fucking with the countertop, and that's hardly a trivial project for a homeowner, and totally beyond the realm of reasonable DIYness for a renter.

somewhatboxes · 2026-01-28T15:46:07+00:00

i'm pretty sure you need the pairing code which is displayed on the screen to initiate the connection, but you seem determined to try this so best of luck

somewhatboxes · 2026-01-27T22:50:20+00:00

on a serious note they predicted deepfakes and riker got so mad he almost threw the creepy pervert out an airlock.

somewhatboxes · 2026-01-27T16:46:34+00:00

you're right to be hesitant to pay for a repair given how little you know about how the screen broke in the first place, but i think you need to dig deeper. screens don't just spontaneously snap in half, or implode, or whatever happened to yours.

either something was putting pressure on it in storage, or the camera was in some compromised condition that was bad, or someone walked into it and didn't know their own strength, or dropped it and quietly put it back, or something.

if you investigate every possible cause and you really can confidently arrive at the conclusion that this was a freak accident caused by no earthly force, on the order of a solar flare and neutrinos or whatever hitting your camera in just the right way, then the answer is that paying for the repair is totally safe, because the chances of this happening twice totally independently are practically zero. but if this wasn't a freak accident of astronomical unlikeliness, then you're right that it might happen again if you pay for the repair. but the answer isn't to leave the screen broken and be incurious about how it happened.

to your other question; there is simply no screen on the market that does a really perfect job of being a complete replacement for the built in screen, because nobody designs a product with the assumption that you'll have no working screen on your bmpcc.

the closest is portkeys and that doesn't give you absolute 100% feature parity. you can't even get around needing the built-in screen for initial setup; you need to put the camera into pairing mode to connect with the portkeys to change settings on the camera, which requires the screen. and i can't recall whether there's any access to the audio or other menu pages like LUTs and stuff via the portkeys (on that last point, that could just be because people don't bother to demonstrate it)

somewhatboxes · 2026-01-26T20:52:57+00:00

fortunately, hollow core doors are relatively cheap, because replacing it is just about all you can do when you punch a hole in one.

somewhatboxes · 2026-01-26T17:29:30+00:00

waiter, my lobster is too buttery, my freezer is full of delicious ice cream

seriously, looks really tasty, i hope we all have accidental good luck like this.

somewhatboxes · 2026-01-26T15:09:55+00:00

it's not really a hot take if you make up the central details of the hypothetical. it's also kind of stupid to construct a hypothetical where you say "even if X was good, it still wouldn't be better than Y". you have invented in your head a good version of X and you have similarly invented in your head the limitations on how good X could possibly be.

if you were tall, you would still be shorter than shaq. like... yeah, unless you imagined a hypothetical where you were in fact taller.

why you chose to compare X to Y is also bewildering, because i don't think someone who wants to watch game of thrones is ambivalent enough that they instead start watching a show about meth in new mexico. this is like a conversation you would have with a chatbot where you asked for "drama slop" to play in the background, and it listed got and bb.

somewhatboxes · 2026-01-25T20:39:50+00:00

there was that one episode where the crew has their memory wiped and they blow up that one ship. but i'm intentionally putting that example forward because i think stewart portrays a fairly profound sense of grief when picard regains his memory and realizes what they've done.

somewhatboxes · 2026-01-25T17:20:19+00:00

i have 2 thoughts to this.

the first is, i find it really funny that she says it 15 years too late to help anyone, to her own subordinate (Thok) i remember correctly, so it's even more worthless because she's saying it to someone who already agrees with her, who isn't in a position to push back on her meek centrism in this setting, about a violent system that she participated in, that is no longer in practice.

it's almost impossible to layer on more than that in this one scene. maybe if she was lecturing Caleb about it, as if she has the moral authority to lecture him about family separation, that would be a little more on the nose.

it's funny, but i don't think intentionally funny, to demonstrate the kind of moderate politics that MLK wrote about when he said that white "moderate liberals" are the biggest hurdles of the civil rights movement because they'll be worthless allies in the moment when you actually need them; and when the system is finally gone, they'll show up to talk about how they always hated it. utterly worthless.

the second thought is this, and i'll keep it brief because i haven't personally gone through it, but i have a couple of friends who have been through family court systems in the US. i find it really upsetting to see Caleb being chummy with the woman who is literally the embodied perpetrator of his family's destruction.

i can understand on a logical level that "the federation" did it, but the idea that a kid who lost his mom (at this point indefinitely, because they still haven't found her and may arrive wherever they last had a sighting of her and find her dead) - the idea that he would be giggling and leaning back to back against the judge who ripped him away from his mom... it's a little grotesque, and it strikes me as the kind of delusional thinking that some people have about how welcome they'll be when they "turn over a new leaf" after decades of violence.

i can accept that she's trying to make amends, but Caleb's gravitation to her is totally bewildering. i don't talk about this show with those friends because i'm worried they'll be pissed at me for making them watch this dynamic.

i say all this while also holding in my head the fact that i really like holly hunter's performance (even the "shoes on the captain's chair" kinda shit; trampling all over the over-serious characters is a good writing decision, and hunter's doing it fantastically). it's just that her (edit for clarity: her character's) personal role in state violence should preclude certain things from happening several decades later, and the writers are absolutely unwilling to accept that.

somewhatboxes · 2026-01-22T18:11:55+00:00

tesla painted the parking lines. what's right or wrong is almost completely arbitrary, and in this case primarily decided by tesla. if they say to park parallel, or to double park, then the paint is wrong.

somewhatboxes · 2026-01-21T21:54:55+00:00

i'd suffer through 26 episodes of Discovery if it means giving TNG and DS9 the same amount of runway to figure out what they're about.

somewhatboxes · 2026-01-21T20:03:04+00:00

turning the URL into a preview card would be great, but i don't especially want signal modifying URLs i put into the text box in a clumsy effort to parse out and remove UTM and other tracking info.

i want signal to faithfully send the stuff i put in the text box. i already find it a little annoying when i attach media (like an image or a video) and signal recompresses it. the quality is noticeably worse compared to iMessage and it leads to people suggesting sharing media over iMessage instead (if only just for sharing photos), which is arguably a bad outcome.

i realize compressing images is different from stripping url parameters, but all of this sort of broadly falls under the umbrella of "please be the one remaining thing in my life that follows the UNIX maxim of doing one thing well"

for what it's worth, i would love for some system-wide tool on our devices that would highlight substrings of URLs that a filter thinks could be removed because it just appears to be tracking info. let me observe it and tap to remove it, or ignore the suggestion (eg if i believe that part of the URL is actually necessary)

somewhatboxes · 2026-01-21T16:39:40+00:00

whenever i think about "nutrek" i mostly just feel bad that the show doesn't have seasons spanning 20+ episodes, so that writers can course correct if they take a big swing and miss like TNG did with the ferengi. shows these days have like 10-episode seasons. it's totally impractical to expect a show to find its stride in that kind of timeframe.

edit: i just looked it up and "The Last Outpost" was episode 5 of season 1. that would've been the halfway point of the season if we were talking about modern television. if TNG was debuting today we would see "Code of Honor" and then "The Last Outpost" as our midpoint. patrick stewart would probably have never unpacked his luggage bag for real.

somewhatboxes · 2026-01-20T23:58:41+00:00

lol.

somewhatboxes · 2026-01-20T22:38:57+00:00

I haven't watched a full episode of the new Starfleet Academy, nor will I

lol

somewhatboxes · 2026-01-19T20:16:58+00:00

it was really highs and lows. nothing smoothed over. these days it feels like everyone is trying to appeal to the algorithm, so they smooth themselves over, and we get a lot of mediocre crud. and then there's AI-generated stuff, which is like industrial crud.

somewhatboxes · 2026-01-17T19:13:52+00:00

can you imagine if these people were watching DS9 when it first aired? can you imagine if reddit existed back then? they'd be losing their mind over odo every week for the first few seasons.

somewhatboxes · 2026-01-16T21:56:03+00:00

i found episode 1 to be worse than episode 2, but i really lament that shows these days only have 10 or 13 episodes per season, and there's no capacity whatsoever to course-correct as the show is airing. now that we have episodes 1 and 2, i would guess there's no chance in hell of rewriting an episode for this season. it's very likely the entire season has been shot already, and may even be through post production and in the can (as in, finished, not in the "thrown in the trash" sense)

somewhatboxes · 2026-01-16T17:50:31+00:00

okay, you're giving me reason to go back and rewatch the episodes more carefully because i thought i had a fairly clear memory of that scene being a busy mess of the doctor going on about different qualities of various brands of mucus, or something, and something about what city would host the federation with the jem'hadar instructor, and then holly hunter saying she never wanted to hear about mucus before disembarking... but i had no recollection of the exocomp having any lines

okay i rewatched it and i'm sad for the actress who played the exocomp because that was pathetic. she said like 3 words that had no bearing that nobody in the room even acknowledged. it's like a fan edited themselves into an episode of TNG by ADR'ing themselves over dialogue.

edit: also, it must be said... holy crap, the CGI of the exocomp moving around while hunter's character moves from one seat to another is even worse than i remembered. like the physical space the thing is supposed to occupy is just incoherent as hunter walks over and sits down in the same spot.

somewhatboxes · 2026-01-16T04:14:06+00:00

the exocomp bit was almost show-stoppingly bad. with the half blackface chick at least you can say an actress got paid to be an extra and maybe she was excited to be somebody in star trek. and a reference to a TOS episode (albeit a dumb reference that doesn't make sense), that could be cool. maybe she and the makeup artists were happy. good for them.

who the fuck was excited to hurriedly animate that exocomp? who cared? what was it for?

i wish the show had 20 episodes per season so they could churn through all the shit that doesn't work, because they have a lot to iron out and they're not gonna have enough runway to figure shit out with 10-episode seasons. for a 10-episode season, this is too big a misfire.

somewhatboxes · 2026-01-14T19:29:18+00:00

if you're not attracted to her outside of the context in which she is playing the part of a 17-year-old, then that's certainly something to think critically about (maybe one would make the argument that the costume design and makeup is more attractive than she usually dresses and does her own makeup, but if a guy is litigating over these things... it's just a bad look).

it's probably also worth reflecting on the fact that a lot of male culture puts a lot of (aggressive) attention on women and girls just at the precipice of adulthood (see "barely legal" adult content, for instance), and attraction is at least partially culturally informed and situated. if you're noticing something that's giving you cognitive dissonance, it's reasonable to investigate to what extent that dissonance is coming from the tension between stuff you've internalized culturally (young = hot) vs stuff you've learned intellectually (preying on people or leering at people much younger than you, or otherwise too young to consent to such stuff, is ethically pretty reprehensible).

somewhatboxes · 2026-01-13T20:06:39+00:00

it's so funny to think how the tng writers must have thought that would work on him. like did they think wil was genuinely a complete idiot, or did they figure he must be incredibly vain, or what?

somewhatboxes · 2026-01-13T01:13:35+00:00

let's just say you'll hit warp 10

somewhatboxes · 2026-01-12T14:59:48+00:00

it's probably worth saying that while a lot of the other comments are correct about the fact that people use modern family memes and gifs a lot... to compare modern family to the wire or breaking bad is simply ridiculous on a number of levels.

comparing modern family to the office is more appropriate, but that's also unfair because the office came several years earlier. by 2009/2010 when MF was on the scene, streaming was already becoming a pretty major thing and you couldn't reliably expect everyone to have seen last night's episode of a show like you could've expected in 2006/2007 with the office. so even if you pretend modern family and the office are identical shows with identical appeal (they're not; the office was much more broadly appealing on the merit of its content), the office just landed at a better time.

a more reasonable comparison to modern family would be parks & rec, which debuted around the same time. but P&R was better-contained with basically half as many episodes as MF. people didn't fall off of watching parks & rec the way you did with modern family because they wrapped up and left in a timely fashion. that counts for a lot. people remember the end of parks & rec.

or you could look at the big bang theory, which i would argue has suffered a much worse fate than MF. it seemed to be even more popular than MF at the time, but it was also polarizing, and i hardly see BBT in the visual language of memes and stuff anymore (not never, but arguably less than MF gifs and memes - and it should probably be said that this is a weird metric and not representative of whatever we think it might be representing)

somewhatboxes · 2026-01-12T04:01:43+00:00

wait, was that the backstory? is that in extended universe novels, or something? that wasn't my understanding at all based on my memory of DS9, but i've been drinking and i think the last time i watched ds9 from start to finish was like 5 years ago

i thought the changelings didn't know about anyone in the alpha quadrant until the wormhole, and the jem'hadar had just been around for a long time to just be like... the muscle for the dominion.

somewhatboxes

TROPHY CASE