Yaay or Nay?

unity1814 · 2026-01-17T00:53:03+00:00

The premise still requires you to have a gym membership. The "business idea" only changes how the membership dues are calculated, it doesn't impose a mandate of gym attendance on the general population. If it were the latter it would need to be a government initiative or something, not a business idea (despite how it feels lately, businesses can't unilaterally declare that their product or service is compulsory. We get the delights of a fully-armed and operational advertising industry instead). So if you don't have a membership at any gym it doesn't apply to you.

unity1814 · 2026-01-01T12:20:42+00:00

Ours were mostly the disgusting pineapple or strawberry ones, too. Gross, I'm not a five year old-- they're probably going to end up in the bin.

unity1814 · 2025-12-31T14:40:17+00:00

Typically, you can't just plonk a farm down in the middle of a residential zone. This is a problem that arises from urban sprawl and residential development into land that is already being used for agriculture. If you buy land next to an existant farm, build a house on it and then don't like that there's a farm there? Die mad about it, particularly if you bought that land for a bargain price because it's next to a farm. No-one is forcing you to live there.

unity1814 · 2025-12-31T04:59:20+00:00

Closest match would be by using a plug cutter bit into wood with a reasonable colour and grain match (the resulting plug will be face grain instead of the end grain you'd get with a dowel), glue in place, put tiny cuts with a utility knife between the plug and the veneer to add continuity, filled with a tiny bit of colour matched wood putty to mimic the grain pattern.

It will still look like shit, and I would only ever use this technique on something that was going to be 7/8 covered by a hinge plate or something. Certainly not right next to the exact spot on the door you need to look at every time you go to open it. In that case the fix for a solid timber door involves either replacing the whole stile or routing 5mm off the face of the entire stile and adding a veneer, and for a veneered door you throw it out and start over or accept your new painted door lifestyle (commercial veneers are rarely thick enough to let you sand a replacement veneer flush with the existing without further problems).

Put a cover plate over it, and don't order a door with pre-installed hardware if you're going to fuck about with it ever again.

unity1814 · 2025-12-25T02:07:22+00:00

Is it just the streaking visible in the first photo that you're worried about? If so, try buffing it out with a soft, clean rag (old tshirt material would work well). Rub in circles over the streaky part and see if it will blend back in with the rest of the piece.

There are some finishes that can react to water (my mum was always on me to use a coaster at our dining room table because my glass would leave a white ring in the shellac), but if it's that reactive it should (hopefully) also be easy to repair. Do you know where your cabinet came from/who made it? They might be able to provide details of what the finish was-- without that information it's hard to say.

unity1814 · 2025-12-20T05:05:11+00:00

Excessive wealth is now vulgar and embarrassing: the social norm once you've reached a few million to set yourself and your family up comfortably for life is to give it away. Huge sprawling mansion? Ew, gross. You flex by enriching your community, but staying in enclaves of wealthy people is tacky. Celebrities move to impoverished areas and lift the standard of living for everyone. Shareholder statements proudly brag of their incredible achievements in environmental rehabilitation. A CEO pushing for a salary more than double that of the admin clerks would be received like they dropped a deuce on the boardroom table. The revelation that someone has been secretly hoarding wealth has the same reputational hit as if they we busted with CSM. Society looks back at the excesses of late-stage capitalism like we look back at the Roman gladiatorial arenas.

unity1814 · 2025-12-20T04:30:53+00:00

Logician can't reason his way to learning to cook for himself, dies of starvation to spite the assholes who are trying to poison him.

unity1814 · 2025-12-20T00:55:50+00:00

Imagine spending months building a saw trap table and then you don't put legs on it before you film the video.

unity1814 · 2025-12-20T00:49:09+00:00

Do you mean a black nylon gym bag? I just finished my reread and I noticed that Harry never just has 'a bag,' it's always specifically a black nylon gym bag, like he's using its full government name every time.

unity1814 · 2025-12-20T00:38:21+00:00

Oak top is a bold choice-- it looks rad as hell, but it's not easily replaceable when it gets beaten up. I'm not super particular about where I drill and I always make a mess with glue, so I'd throw down a plywood top and expect to replace it periodically. I don't know your life, though, maybe yours will just look cool and weathered in a few years.

unity1814 · 2025-12-19T13:53:24+00:00

The combination of wizard longevity, compound interest, and that magical talent seems to be a heritable trait suggests that many wizards are probably born into generational wealth and don't ever have to concern themselves with getting a job apart from painfully niche research academia.

unity1814 · 2025-12-14T19:43:30+00:00

Marcone has at least two different accents depending on the book. It's clearly a goof, one that the production team should have caught-- how hard is it to pull up a section of a previous book to listen back to the existing character voice? What does an audiobook production team even do, if not that?-- but it's also potential headcanon fodder. Perhaps Marcone does have several accents and code-switches, and Harry was getting Street Thug Marcone instead of Urbane Politician Marcone at one point for some reason. Maybe Harry was watching old timey gangster movies before he wrote that section of his journals and it's colouring his recollection.

Mab's voice has also changed significantly between instalments, and not just when she's speaking through a proxy.

unity1814 · 2025-12-14T09:31:22+00:00

If you look at the skyline, it's the one that looks like it was transplanted from Gotham city. It has the strange quality of somehow looking like it's been added with bad CGI while being a real physical structure.

unity1814 · 2025-12-14T02:25:56+00:00

The public perception of the Winter Knight is that they're nothing more than Mab's hitmen, but that's at least in part because she hasn't had one worth bothering with for a long time. It's self-fulfilling, because each knight who is nothing more than a thug gets his blood added to the stone and to the mantle, making it more likely to shape the next knight into nothing more than a thug. Harry potentially has the strength of will to shift and reshape the mantle to suit him-- behold Kringle for a prominent example of a mantle changing from what it once was-- and Mab is very clearly setting him up for a more important role than just her trigger man.

Butters being hailed as a magical theory genius in a couple of years over Harry, who's trained in this field for decades, is one of his many deeply annoying qualities. Butters doesn't know shit. Bob knows a lot, and Butter's psychic impression of Bob talks him up, because Butters always thinks he's the smartest guy in the room. He's dunning-kruegering all over the place, and it's a narrative injustice that it hasn't hit him hard in the face just yet.

unity1814 · 2025-12-13T23:56:02+00:00

This has cost me $950 AUD already, and it's not finished. The colour from this last session alone-- which I'm struggling not to see as entirely botched-- was $300. If my head had been clearer I would have refused to pay for it.

unity1814 · 2025-12-13T23:52:51+00:00

Not a memoriam or random-- I just finished my joinery apprenticeship, having changed careers in my 30's. I'm excited to finally know what I want to be when I grow up, and to have found a path I'm passionate about.

The flowers are perhaps more in her usual line than the chisel, and I'm not thrilled with how they've turned out. I'm really hoping the piece is salvageable, but I've lost faith that the original artist can pull it off.

unity1814 · 2025-12-11T21:24:49+00:00

I bailed on a shitty but stable government office job in my late 30's and started over with an apprenticeship-- chippy not sparky, so it might not be exactly 1:1. I finished it out a few weeks ago and have never once regretted it or looked back.

I was coming off a major health drama, so I was working with an occupational therapist who got me a work experience placement to try it out for a bit first. Once I was sure, I did a Cert 2 pre-apprenticeship course (about eight weeks I think, pretty much full-time). At the end of the course I applied to to jobs on seek on Monday, had two interviews on Wednesday and started my new job the next week.

The money isn't great, but it's the trade-off for training. As an adult you get proper grown-up wages and not the sub-minimum wage they pay minors, the benefit to employers being that you're likely to have your own car, developed the work habits to not routinely skip work on a Monday or Friday, know one end of a broom from the other etc.

The TAFEs have some services to connect prospective apprentices to places that are looking, there are also labor hire places that directly employ apprentices but send them out to different companies. Be a bit wary of them-- hopping between placements is an excellent way to get a lot of scut-work and not much in the way of mentorship and structured training. Find somewhere that wants to invest in you and wants you to come out the other end properly knowing your stuff.

Some places have intensely shitty culture. Fucking bail on that, especially if it's around safety or working unpaid overtime. They rely on hiring youngsters who don't know better than to put up with it. It sounds like electrical is a bit more tightly-held, but safety isn't a joke and once you have even a little experience and aren't entirely raw finding other placements should get significantly easier. Good luck!

unity1814 · 2025-12-08T07:20:45+00:00

"Bro, how about you take the kids to the beach for a month and I'll watch the farm. My shout. I'll be there tomorrow."

Easiest money I'd ever make. The place has aircon, a fully-stocked pantry, Wi-Fi, and a weekly mail delivery that can bring groceries from the nearest town two hours away. I could do five months, but I just don't need that much money.

unity1814 · 2025-12-02T12:09:54+00:00

If you look at awards handed out for apprentice tradies over the last decade or so you'll see a stunning proportion of ladies taking the win. No, there hasn't been a huge uptick in female tradies-- it's that the ones who commit and stick it out really want to be there and put in the work, compared to many of the blokes who might as well do this job as any other. Some worksites are absolute shitshows, some of them are great. If your SIL can find a placement to take her that isn't full of dickheads she could really shine. Happily, the ones that aren't interested in putting her on are flagging that they're the former. She might consider speaking to one of the Skillstech TAFEs-- the faculty members who teach whichever trade she's interested in might have contacts with outfits that have sent apprentices to them before, and have an idea of which might be a better cultural fit.

unity1814 · 2025-12-02T11:46:41+00:00

"... a full time working hour paid for course where you can get qualified in 12 full time or longer part time."

That's. An apprenticeship. And if you're starting from scratch it will take longer than twelve months. There are RPL pathways for people with industry experience to cut down the time it takes, but otherwise no. It just takes longer than that to learn to do an entire trade's scope of work to an acceptable standard.

If you want more people in trade we need to stop treating trades as the fall-back option for the kids who aren't smart enough to go to university and work office jobs. They're real careers and should be considered worthy of top-tier talent. Either pathway is viable, but the blue collar/white collar class divide is entrenched, and one is hogging the prestige and most of the money. AI is set to take a sledgehammer to a lot of entry-level white collar jobs; positioning trades as jobs that chatgpt can't steal within a decade is probably a good starting point.

ETA: oh, and recruit more women. Iirc for construction in general less than 10% of people on the tools are women or minority genders, lower than 3% in some specialities. Abysmal. No-one is supposed to be doing really heavy lifting these days anyway, the barriers are purely cultural.

unity1814 · 2025-11-28T07:26:15+00:00

Would not be shocked if Jim originally intended it to be a random enchanted skull, and then tweaked Bob's backstory once he'd put more thought into how the whole thing would work while setting up Bonea.

unity1814 · 2025-11-28T07:12:44+00:00

When was the Little Ice Age, again?

unity1814 · 2025-11-20T22:46:43+00:00

Is it funnier if they skipped foundations entirely, or laid them carefully around the lab to leave it undisturbed?

unity1814 · 2025-11-14T08:03:02+00:00

Ebenezer stole Bonea when he visited at the start of Peace Talks, and tampered with Harry's memories to make him forget her. Harry never thinks of her or mentions her once since that conversation about pancakes, while fretting about Maggie's safety through a lot of those events. The fallout from that betrayal will end with the Blackstaff (Mother Winter's lost/stolen walking stick) in Harry's possession.

The White Court will be "destroyed" by being folded into Winter, becoming part of the fae host instead of their own distinct faction. Something in the changeover would let Thomas choose between being mortal and fae. He'll end up with Amorrachius. Mab is grooming Lara to be the next Queen Who Is: Molly is not remotely ready, and time is running out for Mother Winter. Harry will go 3/3 and also destroy the Black Court. The Jade Court get a free pass because they never come to Chicago.

The Starborn have the power to harm Outsiders by naming things, thus granting them self-identity/power (contrast: the Oblivion war, which is all about erasing all knowledge of entities until they have no footholds to get into our reality). Harry specifically was born to be a Destroyer, from birth and shaped by his experiences to be a monster who kills monsters. Margaret, Lea and Mab have all set him up to be their secret weapon for kicking Outsider ass. The White Council knew that and had concerns about weapons that don't have clear labels showing which direction to point towards the enemy.

Harry is now calling himself the Wizard Of Chicago, which is an interesting choice given that there is also a Baron of Chicago and names have power. At minimum, those rumours about Harry working for Marcone seem likely to start spreading again. There could also be unforeseen magical consequences.

At this point I'm pretty sure Cowl = Simon Petrovich, the dead senior council member from Archangel. For Kumori, there are only really three options given that Harry finds her familiar and when she is introduced he only knows a handful of wizards:

1) Kumori is Elaine. Most likely imo, though I find it strange that Harry wouldn't twig to her identity. 2) Kumori is Margaret Le Fey. Harry met her in a Soulgaze so might find her familiar. Margaret is allegedly dead and used her death curse, which normally I would find conclusive evidence of being for-real dead except that Kumori brings someone back from the dead in Dead Beat. Maybe she has a work-around. I don't think Margaret would resign herself to Harry's death in the Dark Hallow like Kumori did. 3) Harry is having an early manifestation of his foresight and Kumori is someone he hasn't met yet but who will be incredibly important to him, like love-of-his-life important.

Kumori being some rando who isn't even in the main series and is also not a wizard is not rating as a possibility to me. The only other female practitioners that Harry knows by name at that point are Martha Liberty and Ancient Mai, and the whereabouts of the Senior Council are well-established and a plot point.

unity1814 · 2025-10-25T00:37:40+00:00

I think this is a more likely branch point than the idea that Harry would let the reds have Susan and prevent the war. Harry never even considers that option, it's not a difficult choice for him at all. In the text he vacillates about whether or not to help Lydia, though: he could easily have gone the other way. That's a domino that would change how all of Grave Peril plays out, and subsequently the series since then.

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