Today I saw the biggest goose/swan shit I've ever seen in my life. It was gargantuan.

>>439652

Probably swan droppings.

Goose poo doesn't tend to get that big. It's weird looking though, almost like somebody dropped a dollop of cream spinach.

Is it the weekend? I've completely lost all sense of the passage of time. I've nothing much to say for myself, other than that Night Tracks on Radio 3 is fucking brilliant.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000ncf8

>>439651

That's a great album. A few months ago I got very drunk and listened to it again, then emailed Rob Dougan to tell him my thoughts on his album 10 years on and why my opinion on some songs had changed. I don't know if I sent it. I should have.

He owns a vinyard now. I think he's starting to make music again. His voice is the tits.

I had about one half to two thirds of a bottle of Chianti last night and I am feeling pretty shit as it goes today.

My alcohol consumption due to, and after lockdown has become pitiful. That whole culture of going for a pint after work or with your mates at the weekend has really taken a hit. And now with new restrictions in place or looming, it isn't likely going to come back soon.

>>439819
Organic or vegan wine tends not to do that to you.

I bought the tool chest I've been threatening to for half a year from Costco. Everything was going fine until I realised how heavy the two boxes were, one was about fifteen stone, and also was about an inch too long to fit in the boot, so I had to take it out of the box in the car park, and then contort myself across the folded down rear seats and bench press it up while a helpful older Scottish man pushed it from the other end.

Loads of chaps offered help throughout the ordeal, though - I think if it was a big telly or something nobody would have, but since it was a garage/shed dwellers artefact, our brethren could not stand by and watch another of their kind struggle.

>>439823
Oh I'm so glad to hear this. Have you filled it up with tools yet? Is it as good as you hoped?

I fingered all the drawers in my local branch yesterday. I noticed they definitely have lowered the price.

>>439822

Most wine is generally vegan. The alcohol is produced by yeast, which vegans have no problem consuming, and pretty much all the fining processes of wine before it is put into a bottle are also without the use of animal products.

With two exceptions, one being that wine which contains too much tannin is sometimes fined using gelatin. Tannin and gelatin have opposing electrical charges, so they bind to each other and precipitate, leaving cloudy sediment at the bottom of your fermentation vessel that is discarded when the wine is racked.

The other method is isinglass fining, which is basically the dried and powderized swim bladder of fish, usually sturgeon. It is used to remove cloudiness from wine, but it, too, normally precipitates fully. And it has fallen out of use in the last few years.

Unless you're being sloppy in the fining process and don't rack your wine carefully so that sediment from your fining stays in your wine, which then cannot be filtered out, your finished wine will not contain either of them. So if it's really vegan depends on if you only accept products as vegan that didn't at some point during the production process use animal products that were later removed.

Organic wine, on the other hand, means no pesticides, fungicides or herbicides were used. But normally, even the amounts found in highly contaminated wines are usually too small to really have any kind of adverse effect just from drinking a few glasses of it. If you look at things like cherries, they are often treated with acetamiprid, a neonicotinoid, but you'd probably have to eat a whole bucket of cherries before you'd get half the nicotinoids from it that you do from smoking one cigarette.

A much more likely source of bad headaches after wine are fermentation byproducts such as complex alcohols or acetobacter metabolites. They are usually caused by a lack of sanitation or by otherwise non-ideal fermentation conditions.

>>439827

Welcome to .gs. paragraphlad

>>439824

I'm looking for tools also, I could do with a wrench set and some proper screwdrivers.

Is Stanley a good brand? I saw an offer a few days ago but wasn't sure.

The problem I have on weekends these days is that I forget what to do with myself when I'm not busy and only get back into it on Sunday morning. Maybe I should start using an office calendar for my weekends as well.

>>439819
I know the feeling, I went out for a few pints last week and it took about 4 days for my guts to feel right again. I refuse to drink on my own so prior to that I'd probably not had more than 10 since Christmas. I'm not sure I miss it if I'm honest outside of it just being something to do with your mates.

They (the shadowy lizard-men from Uranus) should just legalise weed so we can have a couple joints in a park using those plastic tip things like in shisha bars. If you think about it the answers is obvious that we need is something that:

1. Has people socialising in small circles.
2. Can be done in the open.
3. Gets people consuming.

It'll probably help wool sales with everyone needing a decent coat as well. Rishi can put a coupon in every baggy for a British made jacket and thereby save the sheep-farmers.

>>439824

I haven't filled it up yet - I am dedicating an entire day to that tomorrow. It really is very good, and very sturdy - certainly the cabinets for twice or three times the price I was eying in Machine Mart are stronger, but I have no doubt this will also take a beating quite well, and honestly the drawers feel smoother on this than some of the fancier options I agonised over.

My theory is that they have discontinued it - on the website it's listed as out of stock, and it appeared very much like I got the last non-display one at my local store. I paid £515 including VAT (which of course means it only really cost £412 because I absolutely definitely bought this mechanic's tool chest for my consultancy business) I really don't think I could have found something better for the price, even if admittedly, the price is still ludicrous for basically a chest of drawers on wheels.

I am certainly glad I pulled the trigger, even if it means I'm going to have to rearrange my entire garage to accommodate it. As has been discussed before, it's really quite a shame they only sell it as a set and don't price the top and bottom bits individually, because for my situation I really could have done with one full unit plus a second bottom half.

>I fingered all the drawers in my local branch yesterday.

IYKWIM

>>439827
Don't most fancier wines have absolutely tiny traces (like, <1ppm) of egg in? Iirc, they crack an egg white into the barrel and it does... something to stop it going nasty.

>>439830

Stanley are good, particularly their FatMax line - I see Proper Builders using them all the time. I also like Magnusson when it comes to quality stuff at a reasonable price.

For wrenches, I strongly recommend the type with a ratchet ring on one end - it's just one of those quality of life things that are worth the extra cost. Halfords socket sets and spanner sets greatly exceed the quality you'd expect from the companies reputation, and a lot of the kits have lifetime guarantees - worth their weight in gold if you're doing stuff that might actually break them, like trying to force a rusty bolt off a car.

>>439834

Egg whites are used in fining, in exactly the same way isinglass is. I don't really know how common it is, however.

>>439836
One or the other aren't uncommon as most wine iirc isn't marked as vegan, which there's no reason not to do if it does qualify.

The same is true of beer in fact; the brewing process is very similar, there's no obvious reason beer shouldn't be vegan but the majority of it is not. I've found myself drinking Stella as it's the only vegan lager my local stocks. You can look drinks up on Barnivore if you want to check.

>>439835

> worth their weight in gold if you're doing stuff that might actually break them

I once had to cut a Proxxon box wrench in half to make a tool for removing the catalytic converter off the turbo charger in my early 2000s Passat. It was so poorly accessible that no full-length wrench fit in the gaps, nor did a 1/2'' or 1/4'' driver. Trying to saw it off with a metal hand saw only made the saw blade dull, then I took a Dremel with a thin grinder disc at high revs, and it still wore down more than half of a brand new 1.5'' disc. They're incredibly tough, but also one of the most expensive brands, I have found.

I'm sure this is a hack comedy bit I've heard before, but I've built up a very real collection of "things I was too polite to say I don't like" to people and now I'm semi-frequently subjected to food my mum thinks is great, invitations to play games I actually kind of hate and discussions about topics I really could not care less about.

Pork and leek with an apple and sour cream sauce is a handful of peanuts away from being the most detestable sounding meal on the planet in my opinion, but I said I thought it was "alright" once so here we are.

Some wee beastie's eating my chillies before they can ripen. I've stuck the most ripe in some brine, should be nicely fermented in time for next year's harvest so I can get some interesting sauces made up.

I've twigged that despite my apparent achievements i'm just a sad sorry mess who's spent 15 years doing nothing.

Pints though.

>>439841

>Some wee beastie's eating my chillies 

What are they?

Bit late in the year for aphids.

I've got about three times as many chili peppers now as I need for the next nine months of spicy cooking until the next batch starts to ripen.

Some of them might go into sauces, like sweet chili sauce, or maybe I will make some chili-infused olive oil.

>>439843
I think it's some sort of worm or maggot.

Ignore the mess that persists after 12 straight hours of organizing the entire garage (and auxiliary shed), but I finally have enough room to actually work on a car indoors - it has been a long time since I've had that luxury and I'm over the moon.

>>439845
Tremendous. Quite jealous of your toolchest.

Violently shitting and throwing up at the same time is fun.

>>439847
On the bright side, I don't think those are symptoms of the virus?

>>439848

Norovirus, most likely.

I wanted to do this last night but I couldn't find any garlic or onions.
Got tired of doing things by halves, here's the remaining 2L of chillies, plus garlic, black garlic, ginger, onion and Sichuan pepper in brine. In two weeks to six months it just needs running through a blender and should be some tasty hot sauce.

>>439850
Looks delicious. Particularly digging the old-school Dymo labels.

>>439851
Thanks. Yeah they have a very hip "Ideal Homes" magazine aesthetic.

>>439850


You might have a chili pepper maggot infestation.

https://chat.allotment-garden.org/index.php?topic=116272.msg1344956#msg1344956

I'd never heard of this before you brought it up, thankfully my crop this year was not affected by it.

You could try acetamiprid next year, it helps against all kinds of creepy crawly things that eat fruit.

>>439853

Pepper maggots specifically turn the peppers red early and that's not happened. I think it's some mundane local fauna that's got into them simply because the fruiting was delayed* and they were sitting around trying to ripen in the cold and wet too long. With any luck it should be avoidable next year just by encouraging them to fruit earlier**.

*The plants went through two awful aphid infestations.
**Being more vigilant with the soapy-water spray.

>>439848>>439849
Update: my balls are ridiculously hot. I don't think I've ever known them dangle so low away from my body.

>>439849
I've had norovirus; the worst bit is when there's nothing left to come up yet your body is still trying to eject it.

>>439854

In any case, one way of preventing pests next year could be Bug-Clear Ultra Gun.

https://www.lovethegarden.com/uk-en/product/bugclear-ultra-gun-1-litre

It contains the mentioned acetamiprid and pretty much kills everything dead. Aphids, maggots, mites, you name it.

Some sources strongly recommend a waiting period of two to three weeks between application and harvest for food crops, but in all honesty, you'd probably have to eat a whole bucket of contaminated chili peppers before you'd get even half the nicotinoids that you consume with a single cigarette.

>>439857

Sounds as though it would undo all the hard work I've put into turning my lawn into a pollinator-and-wildlife-friendly habitat. I'm putting in a bat box soon, hopefully that will contribute to keeping the insect levels down a bit.

>>439858
Yes I agree lad, with all this doom talk of collapsing ecological systems and declining insect populations it seems like drenching our gardens in universal pesticides is the last thing we want to be doing, so good on you.

>>439858

You're not going to spray any of it of your lawn obviously, just the chili plants.

Being eco friendly is one thing, but if you grow fruit of any kind, you have a choice between keeping it organic and watching your crops rot from various pests, or going chemical and actually getting to enjoy your fruit. In my experience anyway. And you'd probably have to build a whole bat cave to have enough bats to control the levels of harmful insects naturally.

Acetamiprid, although it is a neo-nicotinoid, is considered bee safe, unlike some other substances in that family. And you don't normally use it while a plant or tree is flowering, but when fruit begin to grow, at which point it's even less likely that bees come in contact with it.

>>439860
>You're not going to spray any of it of your lawn obviously, just the chili plants.
The insects don't stay on the lawn area.

Maybe if I start to actually rely on what I can grow to live off I'd consider something like that but experimenting with methods is half the fun of it, I may as well experiment with organic pest control too.

>>439861

>I may as well experiment with organic pest control too.

Suit yourself. I've tried all kinds of it, with all the good intentions like you, but it just isn't very effective. I've come back to chemical pest controls and haven't looked back.

>>439862

I've had four litres of superhot chillies even though I fucked them up earlier in the year and more soft fruit than I can eat or give away from my bushes. I think it's really a question of scale/time available. I wouldn't want to run a proper full size organic farm but it's just a small garden and I have the time to go out and manually deal with infestations as they happen.

>>439863

Even in a small garden, you're not going to be able to just shoo away insects laying eggs on your fruit.

>>439857
I've had good results with this for indoor plants.
Outdoor chilis generally haven't had too much of a problem with aphids between temperature and predators, but my windowledge chilis get completely ravaged by aphids every year.
A couple of doses of acetamiprid early on in the season and they stay completely clear for months.

>>439864

Like I said, I already get a satisfying amount of produce out of my garden. I'm not really sure why you're trying to convince me that I don't.

>>439858
>bat box

https://www.wildlifeacoustics.com/products/echo-meter-touch-2-ios

My missus is licensed to handle bats in the UK and is an expert on them - if you ever fancy treating yourself, buy one of these and plug it into your phone, it is what she uses. It captures their sound and then identifies the species. Simply wonderful little gadget.

>>439867
Is she on silly money? Everyone I know in the bat business seems to earn ridiculous sums.

>>439868
You'd have to be to spend £150 on a squeak-identifying device for your phone.

>>439868
No, she is not. There is though a lot of money in "the bat business" because rich people who are developing rural properties, such as barns, need a clean bat survey before they can begin any work on a property.

>>439869
The (public) organisation she works for paid for it.

>>439867

>you can turn your smartphone into a professional-quality, interactive bat detector, allowing you to hear and record bats flying above you in real-time!


Just what I've always wanted.

I've got bats here and would quite like hearing their squaks downshifted a bit. £150 can fuck off, though.
Lots of MEMS microphones can reach batlike frequencies, so I might have to piss away a few days failing to build something.
What I really want, though, is a tracking camera, as they're complete bastards to photograph. I suspect they show up on thermal IR though, so tracking them in thermal, and blasting with a tight beamed flash should get the job done.

>>439872

You could just bosh something together using an ESP32 camera breakout for around £15 off eBay. I think it can do 1600x1200px jpegs. Then add a PIR sensor for about five quid as the trigger, and use one or even a couple of ultra bright LEDS as your flash in the dark.

Would take a bit of fiddling though, and I'm not sure what shutter speeds the ESP32 board is capable of. Or how it handles low light.

There is a tutorial here where a lad is sitting in a room in broad daylight, and it all looks a bit washed out, given the relatively good lighting conditions.

https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp32-cam-ov2640-camera-settings/

>>439874
>Would take a bit of fiddling though

Depends on how much you value your time - but bodging together a MEMS microphone, an ESP32 camera, a PIR sensor and some LEDS - plus a really good iPhone app with pattern matching to all the known species is infinitely more money, to me, than giving 150 notes to Wildlife Acoustics.

I've never really been into bird watching either, but one of their SM4 devices seems a very cool way to do it. Maybe your time is much cheaper.

>>439876

>Depends on how much you value your time

With that way of thinking, most creative hobbies where you build or make something aren't worth someone's time. Not even building your own shed, or growing your own chilies.

I built a birdhouse the other week from scratch, which cost me close to £20 in materials and six hours of work. A birdhouse as such can be had for less than that on Amazon, but it was good fun spending an evening in the basement building my own.


I'm still up because I can't sleep. Spent all evening poring over a work related thing, drinking plenty of coffee. Fuck.

>>439874 I've got a few of the new 'high quality' Pi cameras, which are C-mount, and a bunch of CCTV zoom lenses which are bordering on being telescopes (and have massive glass, for scooping up photons), so that's my plan, such as it is.
I don't think that the ESP32 cameras will gather enough light to get the shutter times bearable - bats move fast.
LEDs for flashes should be sufficient, if focused into a tight enough beam.
And yes, this is clearly not aimed at saving money. The best way to do that would be to ignore the bats completely. But that's hardly fun.

>>439877
>I'm still up because I can't sleep. Spent all evening poring over a work related thing, drinking plenty of coffee. Fuck.

I've done this so many times this year. Not having to commute anymore, and the subscequent easy availability of a 4pm snooze has completely changed/ruined my sleep cycles.

This, more than any other thing, is the most worrying part of the idea of us returning to "normal" next year - I don't think I can.

I might Blue Myself and stream video games on Halloween. Probably immediately feel like a cunt and hate myself, but I'm thinking about it.

>>439898
u wot m8.

>>439964
I assume he's referring to this.

>>439965
Oh that reminds me, I was recently reading about the lunacy around drinking colloidal silver as a health tonic - if you drink too much it literally turns you blue.

This is pleasing.

>>439967
I keep dragged in to AI / ML projects. I shall keep this handy, it's glorious.

>>439968
I've had exactly the same problem at work recently. This was their first live stream. I feel a small kinship with the engineers involved, but you just know this was a ropey piece of shit python script at fault somewhere, that has been overhyped to fuck.

>>439969

They certainly have some indenting issues there.

>>439969
I hate Python. I hate the weird cult around it. I hate how every potentially useful library targets Python. I hate the syntax, I hate how it seemingly bucks loads of programming paradigms for no good reason. I hate the concept of 'Pythonic'. I hate the massive fragmentation of Python meaning that any time I'm given a Python script to work with chances are it's written in Python 2 so I then have to spend time converting it to Python 3. I hate how everything feels like a hack on top of a bodge on top of a fudge.

It's slow, the errors are generally not helpful, but worst of all, despite everything I've just said, it's genuinely useful in some applications, meaning that you just have to learn to live with it.

What happens though is people start using it when it's not appropriate and you end up with absolutely hulking bits of spaghetti code that are a nightmare to work on.

Sage for autistic ranting.

>>439971

I haven't worked with Python, but I understand it's notorious for attracting amateurs who never learned proper coding, and who aren't going to learn it from coding a few bits here and there in Python.

>>439967
A spot of stick drift.

>>439972

The real bad-boys there are PHP and Javascript. Every cunt who's spent thirty minutes on youtube is a full-stack developer in node.js and Agile now, so you could say I hate Javascript for roughly the same reasons >>439971 hates Python

For me, Python has sort of replaced Perl as a computer Swiss army knife for writing small, throw-away, tools of up to a thousand lines or so.

The problem is, what do you refactor your Python into when your project gets past the prototyping stage in the foul year of our lord 2020? Do you get a prescription for Valium and reinvent not just the wheel but all of the tools you need to make a wheel with C++? Do you enter the Everything Is A Factory hell of Java? Do you try to pretend that Mono will ever be a serious project and use C#? Or do you chop your knob off and use Rust?

Sage because I've been using computers for so long that I fucking hate them and this isn't /g/, and it's fucking Friday and I'm sober and all of this is WRONG.

Sorry, it's been one of those weeks.

>>439972

It's the de-facto language of scientific computing for precisely that reason - a lot of scientists need to do data analysis but don't have a computer science background. Fortunately it's gradually starting to be edged out by Julia, which is a genuinely brilliant language.

>>439972
>>439976
Dijkstra said of BASIC:
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

I feel the same sentiment could be applied to Python.

>>439977

TBF he was criticising a version of BASIC so primitive and far removed from something like VB or even QBASIC that it makes no sense to apply the same sentiment to any modern programming language other than meme languages like Brainfuck or what have you.

Early exposure to extremely high level languages will always make teaching a given programmer low-level languages; I remember 15 years or so ago trying to explain what a socket was to a team of .NET programmers. After about fifteen minutes they had one question: "So socket is kind of like C's API to connect to the Internet?".

>>439979
True, I suppose I am biased having been taught assembly up rather than HLL down.

I think it's the better way, though; you don't have to understand exactly what's going on but at least understanding the basic mechanics that underly what you are doing in any language make everything make so much more sense.

>>439979

I began coding with JavaScript 1.1 all the way back in the late 90s to early 2000s. I was able to make some money on the side creating interactive web sites at a time when many "web designers" drew on reading a book on HTML halfway through. I then progressed to PHP and MySQL, and a few years ago started coding with Arduino, which is really dumbed down C.

I think the fact that I started with JavaScript and thus a scripting language that has a very similar syntax and structure as higher programming languages had a lasting impact on my understanding of programming as such.

At the moment, I am doing a web site again, the first one in quite a few years, it's really more a microsite with only about a handful of HTML pages. So I am doing the coding once again in HTML and JavaScript and CSS, and am not using one of those ready-made newfangled web site builders or even a CMS. I think they both stifle creativity and prevent you from getting a deeper understanding of what you are actually doing on a coding/programming level. And that doesn't even consider the fact that many of those ready-made sites are absolute code monsters that are massively bloated, so much so that a page showing just a handful of pictures and text can have close to 2 MB and three dozen external URL requests. While the site I am doing now has very lean code and a fraction of the data load of many modern web sites, and load time is lightning fast, with all content hosted locally.

So in a way, web design today again attracts people who really haven't got much of a clue about web oriented coding with markup, scripting, or programming languages, and who make their web sites by clicking a few things together. And not always for the better.

Self sage for rambling.

To be honest, I wasn't actually dunking on python per se in >>439969 - I was more throwing shade at the tendency for people who have one SQL query with two joins and a bit of linear regression code they've copied from Numerical Recipes hailing it as Artificial Intelligence¹. It's like ARE WE DATA SCIENCING YET. You can write shit code in any language, you can build enterprise quality systems in almost any language. I think perhaps >>439976 puts it best.

1 - Nobody working in the field actually calls it AI, that's definitely a bozo bit - but then 80% of Machine Learning systems aren't, so the whole space is problematic to be quite honest.

>>439981
> web design today again attracts people who really haven't got much of a clue about web oriented coding with markup,

I think that's always been the case, though -- the dream of Your Own Website™ spawned things like Geocities and later Piczo, and tools such as FrontPage and the accursed Dreamweaver.

>>439981
>So in a way, web design today again attracts people who really haven't got much of a clue about web oriented coding with markup, scripting, or programming languages, and who make their web sites by clicking a few things together. And not always for the better.

At least we've gotten rid of Flash.

>>439988

Say what you like about flash but in the early '00s there would have been nothing else to do online except get into trouble hacking or trolling. It's fair to say that Flash saved every one of us!

I've been to a Turkish barber this morning. Is it normal for them to hold a flaming stick next to your head to singe your ear hairs off?

>>439983

The Geocities era was an interesting time to be around, because it was the time of hobbyists who barely knew how to string a few code segments together to make countless things on your web page blink against a brightly coloured patterned background. There was a carefree disregard for visual design and legibility considerations, and it felt like being at the forefront of a new technology, where it was more about trying new things and telling the world about all your other hobbies.

By the time Myspace came around, this approach did more harm than good, because you were able to include much more memory consuming code like audio or video files, and so you had people cramming their pages with wav files and Flash animations that slowed down your browser and took forever to load.

Today's drag and drop web site editors are a bit better in that respect because it's easier to create user friendly, appealing looking web pages, but their problem is that they are utterly bloated. Which isn't a problem as such with today's broadband Internet and more powerful computers, but it means there are again "web designers" who have no concept of things like lean code.

I think that creating web sites over 20 years ago in the era of dial-up 56K modems taught you to think in terms of data efficiency and file sizes. And it's one reason why I prefer to hand code my current microsite, and why all code is hosted locally on the same server, including the Google web fonts I will be using.

It is pissy pissing with rain, so I'm watching a man in a bo-peep dress make lightbulbs. For those of you who haven't yet discovered glasslinger, I commend him to you all.

Also, where can I get a glass lathe? Seems like the perfect machine to be operating when the weather is like this.

>>439999

I do like a good lathe video.

Forgive me, but is there such thing as a glass lathe? What makes a lathe a glass specific model? I suppose it must pump air in somewhere, but I reckon a regular lathe (with a built in air cooling tube) could be quickly modified to do that.

>>440000
>is there such thing as a glass lathe

I don't know very much about lathes - but it seems they're very metal, with the parts decoupled and using belt drives, to cope with the obvious heat and the air blower seems to be built in. I don't think they have to be that "fast" like wood/metal ones are, and the range of tools they need is much more limited so they look a lot more stripped down.

>>439995
Honestly I'm disappointed we didn't stick with something like the Geocities era.
With time and a developing culture I think anyone could get good at playing with HTML and making their designs legible. Instead, we've basically embraced that if you really want to stick all your personal information online, you should do it on Facebook where there's one fixed design for everyone. Web Design is something for web designers, or maybe programmers, but never your mum and dad. The web is for consumption and cunt-offs, rather than creating something yourself. It's worse than a shame.

But then, I have a fondness for the DIY mindset and an inbuilt hostility to the perceived elitism of designers, who'll actually try and tell you that the average modern website - a 90mb javascript mess of flat design with a menu bar that follows you down the page and with information density rivaling kitchen roll - is good. To hell with them, I'll take my chances with the average pleb and his blink tags.

>>440002
Surely Wix and Squarespace are far bigger than Geocities ever was and far more capable too.

>>440003
If everyone had a personal site built with those rather than with Facebook it would be an improvement over the status quo but my experience has been every site created with those is obviously from the same set of templates. You don't really get the kind of pleasant surprises (and impressive horrors) you do when someone's free to do things in their own way.

>>440004

It's true that most templates now look roughly the same. That said, there have always been fashion trends in web design, and the basic makeup of a web page's layout and design elements has been subject to those.

The biggest trend next to mobile friendliness in recent years has probably been flat design and the use of hero pictures and plenty of whitespace and minimalism. In essence, many web pages today look a lot more like printed magazine pages.

With the stone-age bandwidth of the late 90s internet, your biggest sin used to be 300 kb images on your welcome page. Nowadays, that's almost considered economical, with recommendations for your "hero picture" saying don't exceed 400 kB.

My original point was, if you have a solid knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, then you can create a web page that looks and feels almost exactly the same as a Wix page at less than a third of the data load. Plus, you will be able to make adjustments "under the hood" and go directly into the code if something doesn't do what you want it to. Doing that with Wix or Bootstrap will almost certainly fuck the whole thing up.

>>440000
Glass lathes have a second chuck instead of a tailstock, and it rotates precisely the same as the headstock. This lets you clamp a bit of glass in each, then press them together, both spinning, while you heat and press them into each other more. That's how you join tubes together. (Fast commercial stuff just has a cirumferential burner if they want to join stuff. Glass lathes let you do all this light bulb stuff too...)
Glass lathes don't have much power, nor any of the threading / feed mechanisms that metal lathes have.
I've been looking for a glass lathe on ebay for years. Don't need one, just like playing with fire.
Then there's the

>>439995
> There was a carefree disregard for visual design and legibility considerations, and it felt like being at the forefront of a new technology, where it was more about trying new things and telling the world about all your other hobbies.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently. It was common up until around 2005 or so for people to have "home pages" with a bunch of pages about random stuff they liked. Or a whole page that was just a blog, or a badly cobbled together fan site (that was linked to several dozen other almost identical fan sites via a webring).

It feels like there's a missing niche for people expressing themselves creatively and intelligently on the internet and that hole has only been partially filled by Facebook/Twitter/whatever.

I think I mostly miss blogs. I feel like at some point around fifteen years ago all the clever blogs were turned into books (and the same thing happened with web comics) and now people write vapid and inane "opinion/thought pieces" for click-baity websites for free in the hopes of getting famous rather than actually doing the creative writing that they might have been doing before this whole thing got so commercialised.

Sage very firmly ticked.

>>440007
>It feels like there's a missing niche for people expressing themselves creatively and intelligently on the internet

There are absolutely loads of ways of doing that. But the people who do realise it's a labour of love, takes load of time for not much return and then decide they want to monetise it somehow. Hence the books.

>>440007

> It was common up until around 2005 or so for people to have "home pages" with a bunch of pages about random stuff they liked.

I think they all converted to facebook. For many people, there was no more point tinkering with HTML code you nicked somewhere, when you could present yourself and your hobbies with just a few clicks and in a much more convenient and visually appealing way than geocities or Myspace. Not to mention you could meet millions of other people with your same interests, while a geocities or Myspace page usually stood on its own. There were geocities webrings, wich basically consisted of a few people knowing each other and linking to each other's web pages, but it wasn't the same.

>>440007
Around about that time I made my own home page of that sort, just as a html file on my PC that had all my favourite pages sorted into categories neatly. And then tabbed browsing became a thing and so that stopped being as useful.

>>440013
SimulBrowse had tabs in 1997, Galeon had the familiar tabs-at-the-top layout in the early 2000s (Galeon in GTK1 was king, Galeon on GTK2 was a lame duck). It's freaky how recent yet seemingly ancient these commonly accepte as standard developments are.

>>440012
Transport Tycoon web ring represent.

Because I can tbe fucked to watch it, how bad was the Spitting Image US Election special?

>>440009
> But the people who do realise it's a labour of love, takes load of time for not much return and then decide they want to monetise it somehow. Hence the books.

Indeed. And I think that this affects the creative process to a huge degree. Previously people would write about whatever they felt passionate about writing, and if it took off and ended up with a million subscribers and a book deal it was (almost) organic. I have a feeling that those people who still do creative writing of the "day in the life" / thought/opinion piece "bloggish" sort tend to start out with a marketable idea and try to build a brand around that with the idea of monetising being one of the main driving ideas behind even getting started.

>>440012
> I think they all converted to facebook.

You're partly right, of course, but how many facebooks are there with people posting intelligent, creative, well thought posts as opposed to a few photos and something like "#cheeky corona pints with the lads topbants"?

The other problem is that unless you know the people creating the (vanishingly rare) content then you're never going to find or see it anyway. The whole friend-circle nature of Facebook is very different to the open culture that (old) blogspot or even Myspace blogs or what have you had. I remember being able to go onto one of the larger blogrolls / aggregators, search for a specific subject and within a few minutes find a blog that'd give me hours of reading pleasure. That simply just doesn't work with facebook.

It's also just occurred to me as a I write this that the archetypal blogger was probably replaced by the "vlogger" who was now been replaced by the "YouTube Influencer".

Ticking Moan but really it should say Sad.

>>440028
>The other problem is that unless you know the people creating the (vanishingly rare) content then you're never going to find or see it anyway
Good posts get shared around so it's not totally restricted to friends only but you're right in that it's significantly worse.

>>440028

> I remember being able to go onto one of the larger blogrolls / aggregators, search for a specific subject and within a few minutes find a blog that'd give me hours of reading pleasure. That simply just doesn't work with facebook.

There's an old saying in marketing that if you don't pay for a product, you are the product. Facebook's success was the complete monetisation of people's desire to have a presence on the web and write about the things that interest them as well as meeting other like-minded people. And as is normal for a commercial company selling a product, in this case you to advertisers, everything gets streamlined for market value, and you as the product are managed to maximise returns without even always noticing it.

That isn't to say that Myspace or even blogspot didn't at least attempt to earn money off its users, but Zuckerberg had the uncompromising ambition to take it to the biggest and highest level possible.


>It's also just occurred to me as a I write this that the archetypal blogger was probably replaced by the "vlogger" who was now been replaced by the "YouTube Influencer".

Which was just a logical progression, see above. What it did do to the open culture on the web is that nowadays, young people name "influencer" as one of their top career choices, because they think they get to sit in their bedroom all day talking to a camera and earn unbelievable sums of money that no formal education will ever give them, all the while having companies shoving all their newest gadgets up your arse.

There were people in 2004 who would tell you they were "bloggers", but it was usually shorthand for somebody in between honest jobs, possibly with a liberal arts degree, who needed something to tell his friends so he didn't look quite as much like the layabout that he probably was. In any case, being a blogger and essentially creating content for free and without sponsorship did not enable you to just live off that. But now, becoming an influencer, if you want to have an actual shot at that kind of lifestyle anyway, requires careful career planning, not least because it's now something that tens of thousands of people fancy doing instead of getting shit on in an office ten hours a day.