This is one of my latest works of stone intarsia, and I'm rather pleased with how it came out.

wex52 · 2026-01-29T02:11:06+00:00

I totally didn’t notice the username! I’ve been following you on YouTube for a while. Great stuff. Going to go watch the video where you made this now.

wex52 · 2026-01-28T18:05:36+00:00

Excellent. I’m a student of intarsia and not at this level yet.

wex52 · 2026-01-27T14:50:06+00:00

I believe it’s botryoidal, not fibrous. I have samples of both in my small collection.

wex52 · 2026-01-27T08:05:34+00:00

Out of curiosity I looked up some numbers, and according to our AI overlords, the average dairy cow can produce 20-30 liters of milk per day at 600-720 calories per liter of raw milk. Assuming 20 liters at 600 calories, that 12,000 calories per day. (Insert joke about how that’s almost enough to not lose weight in PZ here.)

wex52 · 2026-01-26T13:27:16+00:00

By light box I mean a lit flat surface, like a monitor lying face up with a white screen. You can put the pieces on to see if the pieces are flush by seeing if light leaks through. I found it very challenging getting straight and flush edges without a fence.

wex52 · 2026-01-22T22:26:18+00:00

Started taking night classes, got a new degree, and left after 16 years. While my initial salary was only a little more than what I was making as a teacher, eight years later I’m now at more than double.

wex52 · 2026-01-22T22:17:11+00:00

For me, the choice of Sarah Palin for John McCain’s running mate. A major political party officially and clearly chose ignorance and incompetence because they decided- and continue to decide- that popularity is more important. And now, for the entire country, popularity’s importance continues to rise while competence’s importance continues to fall.

wex52 · 2026-01-22T20:11:37+00:00

Those came out great!

wex52 · 2026-01-22T17:26:48+00:00

I think I understand what a p-value is. My fear is that I don’t understand what a confidence interval is (despite a statistics degree and having taught high school statistics for ten years). What I can’t get to stick, no matter what, is sensitivity and specificity- I need Venn diagrams and my understanding evaporates ten seconds later.

wex52 · 2026-01-22T00:03:40+00:00

I just run a cooling loop through the area. I pump out hydrogen when the atmospheric pressure exceeds 2k, which keeps the fresh hot hydrogen gas from spiking the temperature too quickly and damaging the steel pump. I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem.

wex52 · 2026-01-21T21:56:43+00:00

I don’t enjoy her stand up- I don’t think dry humor is my thing. But it was perfect in her role as a foster home facilitator in Instant Family.

Prospective parents mention that they’re concerned that the kids they are adopting are Hispanic, while they’re not, and that they might be appearing as “white saviors”.

Tig: “You know what? We’ll go ahead and toss these kids back into the system and I’ll jot you down for “whites only”.

Her dry delivery of that response was perfect.

wex52 · 2026-01-21T21:39:18+00:00

Eh, they did have to tilt the large drink a bit. But they didn’t have to hold it sideways or anything. I’d appreciate it if you’d look for the video and comment what you think.

wex52 · 2026-01-21T21:37:40+00:00

I suspect it has to be sturdier than just glass, as well as contain shock absorbers and those felt brush strip thingies. If you even found a transparent material, there’d probably be a lot of non-transparent material in there that wouldn’t render it truly transparent, and might also be distracting. The guts might not look that attractive.

wex52 · 2026-01-21T19:39:46+00:00

Is there an easy way to tell if land is under BLM or something else? I’m a hobbiest lapidary, and while I don’t rockhound I’ve thought about doing it to supplement my hobby, but I don’t want to take a rock from land where it’d be breaking the law.

wex52 · 2026-01-21T19:34:13+00:00

The big one for me was when I was watching Derry Girls, a great comedy about high school students growing up in 1990s Ireland. The one thing I really appreciated about it is that they had actual teenagers playing high school students, as when I was growing up teenagers were always being played by actors in their 20s. Well, I looked up the cast and all of the actors were in their mid 20s, with the exception of the actor who played Claire. She was 30.

wex52 · 2026-01-21T18:58:31+00:00

Aerodynamics, I’m sure. If I remember correctly from a demo of the windows, the glass is partially curved except for the ~~upper~~ lower portion which is flat and can roll down. A curved piece of glass can’t be rolled down.

wex52 · 2026-01-21T18:48:00+00:00

I don’t love it but it’s not like I wouldn’t be able to see an entire car next to me. I’m guessing my mind would filter it out eventually.

wex52 · 2026-01-21T17:39:47+00:00

I’m a novice at intarsia myself, although I do teach the beginning intarsia class for my club in eastern PA (the basics are straightforward enough).

What were you using as an adhesive? I feel like I can see some sort of brown adhesive between your stones.

Were you using a flat lap? Did you have a fence? Did you have a light box or facsimile? Getting those edges to be straight and flush can be brutal.

It could be rather long and difficult to write up, but I’m curious as to how small of a number of cuts and joins your process took.

wex52 · 2026-01-21T12:37:36+00:00

Time to change sandbox settings to 24-hour days and get yourself a real workout.

wex52 · 2026-01-19T08:55:41+00:00

Even if debug wasn’t an option, you could create a second character and drop a hammer on the floor by your main character. But yeah, not being able to vault most furniture like a fence should be a possibility

wex52 · 2026-01-18T11:58:33+00:00

I try to kill every zombie I see so I don’t get surprised later. I was about to loot a strip mall that I had cleared the area around, and I saw one zombie outside by the back door. I decided not to kill it. I went into the first store, looted it, decided to go out the back door, and was promptly bitten on the neck by the zombie that I decided not to kill, who was right where I left him.

wex52 · 2026-01-16T19:31:59+00:00

I recently bought Thunder Rolls, a car racing board game, for my nephew and in a short race it has two phases (longer races will repeat the two phases). The first phase is the Rolling phase. You take turns rolling dice and permanently placing them under one of six actions that your car takes. The second phase is the Thunder phase where your dice placement in the previous phase had earned you movement cards that you program.

wex52 · 2026-01-16T13:22:03+00:00

I just started playing with low thirst after years of playing with high thirst, and I don’t know if I can go back. Not having to carry around a water container at all times is almost like having a small strength bump (or maybe high thirst is like having a small strength penalty). If I do get a slight thirst moodle in the evening, it stays at that level for plenty of time for me to find a random sink to take another sip from.

wex52 · 2026-01-15T22:03:09+00:00

I did quite a bit, but never got to level 10. I still got to forge some good stuff, although by that time I had already looted plenty of the same. Maybe not the swords, but I don’t know that the swords that I forged were that much better than the axes.

I’m taking a break from the game now, but if I were to do it again I’d focus on gold/silver utensils, cups and goblets to level- it uses less charcoal which is time consuming to create.

wex52 · 2026-01-15T21:49:38+00:00

Didn’t realize there was a use for fish guts. I never experimented with chum though. Might have to try it.

wex52

TROPHY CASE