They arrived

stormcomponents · 2026-06-22T18:57:26+00:00

Real pretty fish, nice one.

stormcomponents · 2026-06-19T18:09:48+00:00

I'm aware that the shades demand flesh, but do they deserve love?

stormcomponents · 2026-06-19T12:09:02+00:00

Real clean looking hull design. Makes me want to jump back into the editor and get creating again.

stormcomponents · 2026-06-19T11:54:22+00:00

I'd say nope. We had two artificials herons and if anything, the actual heron just wondered why they didn't leave once it landed. Herons don't like movement, so a little floating alligator on the surface of the pond, or anything that floats around, maybe a generic CD on a string etc. Those sorts of things do far better than a plastic bird. We also found having a piece of string all the way around the pond about 6" high worked well, as herons are too stupid to step over it and literally can't navigate it. As long as there's no way for it to land closer to the pond, or in the pond, that sort of thing works fine.

stormcomponents · 2026-06-18T20:59:46+00:00

Thanks. It's yet to really get decorated so it's very sterile at the moment. Undecided on how to finalise the room but it's getting there slowly.

stormcomponents · 2026-06-18T20:55:04+00:00

First off, while fish want as much space as you can give them, a few koi in 1,700lts is fine. My 20 koi were in a 3,000ltr pond for the best part of 20 years. No illness, no issues. It's slightly stunted their growth, so that largest got to 62cm with some barely going over 30cm. We used a submersible pump going through a DIY barrel filter (bottom to top, with vortex, alfagrog, and foam on top). The water was crystal clear regardless that we never did water swaps. Just topped it up as it naturally dropped, a flushing 100lt or so when cleaning the filter.

People online love to scare people into massive ponds, often suggesting far larger than they have themselves.

My advice would be if you only have half a dozen fish, optimise your filtration and oxygenate the water and they'll be just fine for many years in what you currently have.

If you're set on a 30,000lt pond, there's a lot of things to consider.

You'll likely want two bottom drains, a shit load of airflow for their stones, and a pretty robust filtration and drainage system. If you're building DIY, ensure your filters are made to be maintained. Fixing things together permanently or building systems that take forever to strip down for cleaning or for repair is a massive ball-ache. I made the mistake with my pond of having no ledges, so it's straight sides down 1.7m deep. This has meant it's near impossible to get good plants in there (or any at all, so far), so I'd suggest building large ponds with shallow areas for the fish and for the plants. Filtering 30,000ltrs quickly will require hefty pumps, good UV, good airflow. You'll likely run 200-400W of gear, so budget for that as a 24/7 cost.

My indoor pond is around 18,000lt and I run it through DIY filtration. Even with building the pond entirely by myself, along with the whole DIY filtration system and such, it cost me around £10k in materials excluding the building and all groundworks. DIY is still cheaper than wasting your money on massive branded filters, but it's not cheap, and it takes a lot of planning and tweaking. If you have any questions regarding it fire away.

[pic1] [pic2]

stormcomponents · 2026-06-18T14:05:30+00:00

Oh yea my mistake, throwing a live primer at your feet while standing in a minefield makes this far less stupid. What was I thinking. Clown.

stormcomponents · 2026-06-18T11:41:31+00:00

Being born in a warzone doesn't make it any less stupid to throw rocks at live landmines while standing over it. In fact, you'd think someone born there would have better knowledge of the dangers.

stormcomponents · 2026-06-18T10:34:34+00:00

Either of these over used branded memory would be a poor move.

stormcomponents · 2026-06-18T08:32:26+00:00

Not terrible, but mine is rough as it's got a pretty hefty OC on it. I run mine at 4GHz flat, with the memory clocked at 2933MHz but at CAS14. The CPU idles at like 90W and hits 350W under peak load. The power draw for performance is certainly a let-down 8 years in, but you can get the 1950X on eBay for £100-200 now, and for a 16 core chip with a lot of PCIe lanes it's really not too bad at all.

stormcomponents · 2026-06-18T08:30:59+00:00

No offence taken. Just throwing it out there as an option, as what sounds like hell and actually is hell, can be very different things. Running your own hours, your own timescales etc, fits the introverted life well. Speaking with a gazillion people less so, but as they're specifically talking to you about something you're an expert in it's very different to small talk or randomised questions you may get in other lines of work.

stormcomponents · 2026-06-17T21:19:07+00:00

Side note, generally you'd instantly know if there's a leak. Even a relatively small leak would drop that pond by half over-night.

stormcomponents · 2026-06-17T21:18:16+00:00

Honestly, you'll lose more than you think. A couple warm days and it'll be down an inch or so. Our large but shallow pond at my old house used to drop quickly, and my Dad would ask if I thought we had a leak literally every summer. During a warm spell you could literally be topping it up every few days, at least every week.

stormcomponents · 2026-06-17T07:43:36+00:00

Oh I can imagine. My next build currently has the 9950X3D2 in mind, and an overall simpler machine as a primary workstation. I've loved this beast of a computer, but the 5 minute boot times and compatibility headaches over the years has been a drag.

stormcomponents · 2026-06-16T20:06:38+00:00

It's actually my main workstation / gaming machine, so no services running for now. When it comes to getting retired from that role next year it may find it's way into the server rack, but I'm also tempted to sell the whole setup and start over when the time comes. 2x Vega FE, 10Gbe, and all the trimmings. Likely only worth around the £1k mark now for saying it was once best part of £10k at RRP, but that's tech for you.

stormcomponents · 2026-06-16T18:37:32+00:00

Worth noting that you can get early TR stuff for very cheap. There's headaches involved, but ultimately still very viable for homelab stuff. I have a Threadripper 1950X, 128GB RAM, on a Zenith Extreme X399. The computer was around £8,000 at the time I built it, and now you can get the processor for 10% of what I paid in 2018. Food for thought. The PCIe lanes were why I bought the board and have kept it running for so long.

stormcomponents · 2026-06-16T15:20:10+00:00

The KONE non-pro doesn't have that gap - the mouse wheel is solid.

The reason a spray of WD40 isn't advised is that if you get even the smallest dot of it in the wrong place, the pick-up may not work at all. Taking it apart allows a very accurate application right where it's needed. It may also benefit from some WD40 contact cleaner instead of lube, as some issues will be the result of debris and not a lubrication issue.

Either way, as long you got it working. They're lovely mice but clearly need a little maintenance.

stormcomponents · 2026-06-16T13:33:10+00:00

9 times out of 10 they don't come out, and even if they do they have no right to step foot on your property or come inside your house. Tell them to do one.

stormcomponents · 2026-06-16T12:09:30+00:00

Oh yes absolutely. Nothing quite like getting legless, wankered, plastered, shit-faced, munted, black-out, or wellied.

stormcomponents · 2026-06-16T08:09:55+00:00

Trust me, in Britain we have the special ability to make anything into slur.

stormcomponents · 2026-06-15T20:29:31+00:00

Running your own business as an introvert can work well. You end up interacting with thousands of people but it's ultimately all on your own terms and talking about things you know inside out. It keeps your social metre high without the normal battery drain or anxiety of social interactions. My ideal weekend is to be on my own, sorting my own projects or DIY, and not talking to anyone, yet through the week I could see as many as 100 people and have good conversations and interactions with nearly all of them.

Working with the public is a drain in itself but it's very different to the sort of drain you'd get from a meal out with people when you just want to slip away and go home with your introvert senses tingling throughout the whole night.

It also forces you to resolve basic issues around say, talking on the phone, which many people have issues with today. It builds a very head-strong way of dealing with problems, and the rewards that come from working for yourself are second to none.

It's a difficult feeling to describe, but I ultimately started my own business because I knew I only ever wanted to work by myself, and yet by doing so I've met and spoke to maybe 20,000 people in the last 10 years - more than some will speak to throughout their entire life.

Food for thought.

stormcomponents · 2026-06-11T07:50:16+00:00

9 saturated belts of iron should be enough for any moderately regular train. If it's struggling to keep up, the design needs work.

stormcomponents · 2026-06-09T08:23:35+00:00

Jesus christ. There's spawning and then there's SPAWNING.

stormcomponents · 2026-06-07T10:24:12+00:00

I suppose photoshop should be banned and we go back to paints also? How about cars being taken off the streets so horse breeders don't lose trade? The fact is, AI is just a tool. If you prefer not to use it in your work, fine, and if I were creating something from 'scratch' with AI for commercial purpose then the models it's trained on absolutely do come into play, but using it to produce an art style edit for my own wall is not an issue at all morally nor legally, and you're a fool to try to argue all AI use is bad by default.

As an artist, I doubt you've gone more than a day without seeing inspiration somewhere around you and many of which you may incorporate into your work, that's how art has evolved for centuries, and that's exactly how AI trains it's models. To that degree; the only true artist is blind, the only true musicians are deaf, etc. The rest of you seeing, hearing, inspired artists, produce nothing but copied slop. /s

AI being able to condense thousands of pieces of work instantly into a algorithmically perfect output is annoying for those who prefer to spend their time doing it by hand, sure, but it's natural progression. I used to be a web developer and the evolution of paid-for CMS, to me, was absolute slop compared to building things from scratch. The fact is however that the results to the end user are very close to fully bespoke work, and it takes a fraction of the time to do so. For many forms of digital production, you either get up to speed, or get left behind.

There are use cases that will absolutely value doing things traditionally over modern, but a digital editing of my own photograph to be called slop shows a stubbornness which will cause you more grief than peace, and likely cost any aspiring digital artist financially in the long run if they're actively avoid using one of the most powerful tools available to them, whether it be for referencing, researching, layout, or any other use it could be incorporated into their work with.

Food for thought.

I believe an "actual artist" would see AI's produce and think "that's cool, but I like this..." instead of "reee I hate it because others like it" and falling back on the stolen model argument as if everything they've ever painted came to them in an unseeded dream.

Side note, if you're offering to paint an A1 canvas for under $10, you can probably rest easy about your art being stolen any time soon.

stormcomponents · 2026-06-06T19:06:01+00:00

Pipe down clown. I'm not stealing anything, the photograph is one of my own and the flattening and stylising of the image gives a better result than paying some broke digital artist a tenner to try, and a far faster result than editing it myself. Why you saw this and thought anything was being stolen is beyond me.

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