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NotActuallyALonghorn

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Everything posted by NotActuallyALonghorn

  1. Just finished, and the treatment of slavery (other than no mention of my largely insignificant ancestors who fought) is probably my biggest complaint. We all are hopefully in pretty much unanimous agreement that slavery was abhorrent and is one of many blights that was rightfully exposed in this documentary. I want to be clear on that point because reactionary Surly can be reactionary, but most of the southern slave holding founding fathers where in a serious pickle when it came to slavery. Slaves represented a significant capital investment, and were often leveraged. Even if they were serious about ending the practice, and few were dedicated enough to jeopardize their lifestyle for the cause, most of them didn't have the financial means. They were cash poor and land rich. It'd be like a modern farmer just deciding that he should buy out the bank for all of his tractors, outbuildings, and other equipment. Slavery was not particularly economical at the time. You had to feed, house, and clothe a labor force that remained idle for significant portions of the year. It seemed like it was an institution that would die a natural death and hopefully not ruin them financially to most of the founding fathers who were slaveholders. They were happy to kick the can of horrific human subjugation down the line. La Fayette was one of the few who put his money where his mouth was and actually purchased a plantation with slaves with the intent to free them. But then came along Eli fucking Whitney with his fancy cotton gin and made slavery economical again...
  2. A Christmas Story is great to have on in the background during Christmas get together. There's no obligation to sit down and watch, but it offers the opportunity to tune in during the iconic scenes like when his dad unboxes the lamp or the flagpole scene.
  3. The Polar Express has to be up there. The animation is terrible and disconcertingly creepy. Like they couldn't be bothered to spend a bit of extra time to make the movements seem in any way natural and decided spreading nightmares was about as good as spreading Christmas cheer. The wife put it on for the kids tonight, but she and the 4 year old were the only ones watching. The middle child was playing Mario 64 on his Switch (pos rep for him) while I pretty much ended up doing everything for him after he tried and failed, or got to distracted dropping the baby penguin down the chimney (he's 6, so he thought that was about the funniest thing ever). Of course we were too much of a distraction from her slow roll horror movie that never ends. Speaking of which, they finally arrived at the North Pole at about 9 o'clock, and I ask if we should start getting the kids ready for bed, as they've already stayed up pretty late and I have stuff I need to do, like watch Ken Burns' American Revolution Documentary. "It's almIost over," I'm told. Fourty five minutes later they are still waiting on Santa to shut up so they can go home and finish the damn story. How in the most unholy of abominations do you stretch a story out so long? It's worse than the droid factory scene in whichever Star Wars prequel that was.
  4. Pirate booty. And who doesn't like booty?
  5. Yeah, that's a hard pill to swallow for a rental.
  6. I'm not sure "shot down" is the correct terminology, but still pretty cool
  7. While we as the public may not know what exactly is going on with UAP, there are tons of government documents that have been released that confirm there has been a cover up going on for longer than most of us have been alive. Whether or not we have been visited by non human intelligence may be up for debate, but whether or not there has been a cover up related to the subject isn't.
  8. Lol, that's cute. We don't even have P&ID's for our steam. We have so much stuff that exists in the field, but not on paper that it's real fun when you are in charge of coming up with a plan to lock it out. We even have ancient AIPed equipment in the field that has no tags or anything, and nobody even remembered what it was named until I stumbled across an old hand drawn drawing from the fifties in which had it on there.
  9. We will just have to legalize shooting the tires out of inconsiderate drivers.
  10. I've got a Rossi R44102 .44 mag snubbie. Recoil is unpleasant.
  11. Oh, so now we aren't supposed to complement a girls tits?
  12. At least they can just send some guys into the reactor with chainsaws. It's not like they have to worry about executing a confined space permit and all the fun stuff that comes along with that.
  13. Somewhere around here I have a DVD of Alone in the Wilderness hanging around. It is a documentary about Dick Proenneke building his cabin and such. It's well worth the watch if you can find it.
  14. Twist rate won't matter much if it is close range. In case you need to come up with a strategy to lure it in...
  15. I mean, why not once you don't have to eat the tax.
  16. Is there really much point in suppreing a 5.56 pistol? Subsonics are basically expensive .22's, and by the time you add the length of a suppressor is it really much quieter than a rifle length gun?
  17. I have a purpose built dryer. It's good for keeping nylon from absorbing moisture during a print, but pretty much none of them will get up to the 90-100C required to actually dry it.
  18. I finally finished my suppressor build this last week, after several frustrating issues printing with PA6-CF. The first attempt went admirably until about 30 hours into the print when a pop up lightning storm cycled the power with just a few hours to go. I didn't have enough filament left on the roll to try again, so I ordered another roll of filament. When it came in, and I went to dry it in the food dehydrator I'd ordered just for this purpose the screen just blinked on and off. After a bit of investigation, I was unable to find any blown fuses or anything obvious wrong with it, so I tried drying the new roll in the oven. The oven clearly didn't keep a proper temperature, because my subsequent print had some spots where it had moisture in it, and was too warped to line up with the bore. Eventually, I was able to get a decent print that seems like it will work. While the core is printed, it has an aluminum tube that reinforces the Z axis and keeps everything from blowing apart. JB Weld is used to bond the tube to the core. A Breek Castle Shield is pinned into the printed core with hardened steel rods to allow it to thread onto the flash suppressor without blowing out. The aluminum tube holds it all together. This is my deer rifle when I'm not fooling around with my flintlock, and I still haven't had a chance to test it out and zero the rifle with the new suppressor. Im working this weekend, but hopefully I'll get a chance to check everything out on Monday when I am off. Until everything checks out I guess I'm going to be hunting with the front stuffer. Anyhow, here is the Pic, it's a .300 BLK rifle with a 10.5 barrel (amnesty braced lower) plus the FTN.4 suppressor. Everything was properly Form 1'd through the ATF for this build and the approval took just over one business day. With the tax for a Form 1 suppressor going from $200 to $0 on January 1st, I can see this being a viable alternative to commercial suppressors if everything works out as it should.
  19. I've heard of folks back in the day who were supposed to be walking pipelines getting lost by following their boots. I guess that's one of the reasons why they put up signs now.
  20. I hate when I find out afterwards that an episode was a season finale. Especially when I'm looking forward to another episode or two.
  21. Elkhorn is nice B western series. The acting and cinematography leaves a lot to be desired, but it is still entertaining. It is about Teddy Roosevelt's early years as a cowboy. Go into it expecting cheese and you will enjoy it. Go into it expecting Deadwood and you will be wondering WTF?
  22. Lol, I originally bought this printer with a gift card I won through a United Way raffle at work. I had been interested in 3D printing for a while, and given the option of choosing a $600 Walmart gift card or a $600 Amazon gift card I realized that if I got the Walmart card it would pretty much go into the general family fund. Of course I noped out of that and chose the Amazon card so I could do some 2a prints for cheap and make a suppressor for little more than the cost of the filament, as I'd been monitoring the development that other folks had been putting time into. Now, I've bought a dehydrator that crapped out after the first use, a filament dryer that suffices to keep nylon blends dry enough for the time it takes to make prints of sufficient accuracy, and you're very reasonably suggesting a UPS. I don't think I've saved any money at all. Now I'm left with the consolation that I could get an FFL and an SOT so that I can work on designing and developing suppressors to make all this worthwhile. I don't think the wife is amused, she already thinks that basically PPE is some kind of boogeyman.
  23. So, for some reason, the Polymaker PA6 spools have a meter scale on the side cutout instead of a gram scale. I had a little over 50 meters left on the spool, which at the 2.81 grams per meter that Google's AI calculated for me, means I'm gonna hit the runout sensor about halfway through my reprint. I've got more filament supposed to be here Friday, but it will need to dry (my dehydrator that I bought for this died, so I guess I'll just have to bake it in the oven) for half a day or so before I can even start the print back. Fingers crossed that there aren't any power issues or one of the kids doesn't unplug it, because I don't think there is a way to save you spot if you kill power to it, and this stuff is already $40 for 500g.
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